Engineered E. coli can be swallowed like a probiotic to train your immune system to hunt down tumors.
Most cancer immunotherapies are expensive, systemic drugs that can have severe side effects throughout the body. These engineered bacteria are designed to travel specifically to tumor sites and release a stimulant that alerts the immune system. This triggers a targeted attack that kills the cancer without harming healthy tissue. Because the bacteria stay concentrated at the tumor, the treatment has almost zero toxicity for the rest of the patient. It turns a common gut bacterium into a precision-guided pharmacy that operates inside the body.
Engineered probiotic bacteria producing an RNA-based TLR7/8 agonist for enhanced cancer immunotherapy
SSRN · 6695431
Toll-like receptor 7/8 agonist (TLR7/8a) has shown potential in cancer immunotherapy; nevertheless, the clinical use of the small molecule-based TLR7/8a is hindered by limited efficacy and severe toxicity. Here, we engineered the probiotic Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 (EcN) to produce single-stranded RNAs with TLR7/8 agonistic activity, aiming to potentiate the immunogenicity of EcN to elicit robust systemic anti-tumor T cell responses while restricting TLR7/8-mediated innate signaling within lo