Columbia University researchers have engineered probiotic bacteria that can be used as personalized cancer vaccines. These bacteria educate the immune system to target and destroy cancer cells, showing promising results in mouse models.
Researchers have engineered bacteria as personalized cancer vaccines that activate the immune system to specifically seek out and destroy cancer cells.
"The net effect is that the bacterial vaccine is able to control or eliminate the growth of advanced primary or metastatic tumors and extend survival in mouse models," says Jongwon Im, a PhD student at Columbia University who helped lead bacterial engineering aspects of the study. The engineered bacteria encode protein targets -- called neoantigens -- that are specific to the cancer being treated. These bacterially-delivered neoantigens train the immune system to target and attack cancer cells that express the same proteins. Neoantigens are used as tumor targets so that normal cells, which lack these cancer-marking proteins, are left alone.
Once activated by the bacterial vaccine, the immune system would be prompted to eliminate cancer cells that have spread throughout the body and prevent further metastatic development. Arpaia adds,"Bacteria allow delivery of a higher concentration of drugs than can be tolerated when these compounds are delivered systemically throughout the entire body. Here, we can confine delivery directly to the tumor and locally modulate how we're stimulating the immune system."The study is titled,"Probiotic neoantigen delivery vectors for precision cancer immunotherapy.
Cancervaccine Immunotherapy Bacteria Personalizedmedicine Tumortargeting
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