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Current advances in microbial-based cancer therapies

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Abstract

Microbes have an immense metabolic capability and can adapt to a wide variety of environments; as a result, they share complicated relationships with cancer. The goal of microbial-based cancer therapy is to treat patients with cancers that are not easily treatable, by using tumor-specific infectious microorganisms. Nevertheless, a number of difficulties have been encountered as a result of the harmful effects of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and alternative cancer therapies, such as the toxicity to non-cancerous cells, the inability of medicines to penetrate deep tumor tissue, and the ongoing problem of rising drug resistance in tumor cells. Due to these difficulties, there is now a larger need for designing alternative strategies that are more effective and selective when targeting tumor cells. The fight against cancer has advanced significantly owing to cancer immunotherapy. The researchers have greatly benefited from their understanding of tumor-invading immune cells as well as the immune responses that are specifically targeted against cancer. Application of bacterial and viral cancer therapeutics offers promising potential to be employed as cancer treatments among immunotherapies. As a novel therapeutic strategy, microbial targeting of tumors has been created to address the persisting hurdles of cancer treatment. This review outlines the mechanisms by which both bacteria and viruses target and inhibit the proliferation of tumor cells. Their ongoing clinical trials and possible modifications that can be made in the future have also been addressed in the following sections. These microbial-based cancer medicines have the ability to suppress cancer that builds up and multiplies in the tumor microenvironment and triggers antitumor immune responses, in contrast to other cancer medications.

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  1. Department of Gastroenterology, Gastrointestinal Oncology and Endocrinology, University Medicine Goettingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Areej Shahbaz

  2. Department of Biotechnology, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, 45320, Pakistan

    Tehreem Mahmood, Muhammad Uzair Javed & Bilal Haider Abbasi

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Shahbaz, A., Mahmood, T., Javed, M.U. et al. Current advances in microbial-based cancer therapies. Med Oncol 40, 207 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-023-02074-x

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