Tumor-targeting bacteria engineered to fight cancer
By Shibin Zhou, C. Gravekamp, D. Bermudes, Ke Liu. Nature Reviews. Cancer, 2018
707 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent advances in targeted therapy and immunotherapy have once again raised the hope that a cure might be within reach for many cancer types. Yet, most late-stage cancers are either insensitive to the therapies to begin with or develop resistance later. Therapy with live tumour-targeting bacteria provides a unique option to meet these challenges. Compared with most other therapeutics, the effectiveness of tumour-targeting bacteria is not directly affected by the ‘genetic makeup’ of a tumour. Bacteria initiate their direct antitumour effects from deep within the tumour, followed by innate and adaptive antitumour immune responses. As microscopic ‘robotic factories’, bacterial vectors can be reprogrammed following simple genetic rules or sophisticated synthetic bioengineering principles to produce and deliver anticancer agents on the basis of clinical needs. Therapeutic approaches using live tumour-targeting bacteria can either be applied as a monotherapy or complement other anticancer therapies to achieve better clinical outcomes. In this Review, we summarize the potential benefits and challenges of this approach. We discuss how live bacteria selectively induce tumour regression and provide examples to illustrate different ways to engineer bacteria for improved safety and efficacy. Finally, we share our experience and insights on oncology clinical trials with tumour-targeting bacteria, including a discussion of the regulatory issues. Therapy with live tumour-targeting bacteria represents a unique opportunity to address the limitations associated with molecularly targeted therapies and immunotherapies. In this Review, Zhou et al. discuss the benefits and challenges of this approach and outline advances in the engineering of bacteria, which have the potential to improve safety and efficacy.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Biotechnology, Oncology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ddd2d66f55f7d22e366c37ecad1c13f27efd33af
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Biomedical Engineering
In Oncology
Citations in the corpus
- N-terminal signal peptides facilitate the engineering of PVC complex as a potent protein delivery system (2022, positive): “Many other protein complexes, such as Tc toxins (10, 11), type IV pilins (32, 33) and pore-forming proteins (34, 35), were also used to accomplish similar assignments toward eukaryotic cells, particularly killing cancer cells (36).”
- The microbiome and human cancer (2021, background): “Though historically contentious, BCT is regaining attention through synthetic biology techniques that programmatically limit systemic toxicities while enhancing regional antitumor immunity (105, 106).”