There fight against cancer has recruited some unlikely allies, from bee venom to the virus close relative of the HIV pathogen, with the conversion of microbes and toxins that in other circumstances would be fatal to humans, into drugs that will then be administered, a change that is turning out one of the most powerful weapons to stop cancer.
A particular challenge is how tumors can suppress the immune system, preventing it from identifying and destroying rapidly dividing cells.
Now, one new research on methods for fighting cancer, he used a weakened strain of Salmonella (yes, the same bacterium that prevents you from eating raw chicken) to make it gather around tumors and signal the growing threat to the immune system; when researchers have it tested on micethere was an intensified immune response against the tumor and extended the survival of multiple mouse tumor models.
The amazing results have been published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, and they go into the step-by-step explanation of how this important discovery came about.
Salmonella typhimurium has already been shown to be safe and effective as a method of administration for and treatments Jinhui Wu and colleagues, at the University of Nanjing in China, have tried to expand its effectiveness by using it as vehicle for delivering signaling antigens directly to the tumorand thus be a possible weapon in the fight against cancer.
Why is Salmonella Typhimurium important for the fight against cancer?
It’s a excellent body for this use for two reasons: it has self-propelled flagella (the little tails that push some bacteria forward), which move much faster than other bacterial species, plus Salmonella it can increase the immune response to cancer antigens.
The tests were conducted in mice after receiving radiation therapy, with each Salmonella bacterium being coated with positively charged nanoparticles that aimed to attach to the negatively charged antigens released from the tumor as a result of the radiation.
This would mean that the tumor antigens, which the immune system could recognize, were then grouped together and neatly packaged outside the tumor, ready for the dendritic cells to notice and act.
In mice treated with bacterial therapy, the83% survivedwhile only 25% of the placebo control group survived, demonstrating that the treatment also resulted in greater dendritic cell activity in vitro and greater crosstalk between tumor antigens and immune cells.
The results suggest that bacterial therapy is safe and effective in mouse models and a similar method of administration could hold promise for fighting immunosuppressive tumors.
Although the research has been successful, it remains limited to mouse models, and tumor interactions in mice are often different from those in humans.
In a statement a The ScientistWu said the team plans to get the treatment done to humans, but needs to run many more safety tests before doing so.
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