Engineering Gut Bacteria as Living Therapeutics

Microbes found in our intestines hold great promise as tools to treat human diseases. Genetically engineering gut bacteria is a unique strategy to design controlled and effective living therapeutics. Microbes are emerging as a new a class of medicine to fight human diseases. However, this is not an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Chemical engineering progress 2020-10, Vol.116 (10), p.27-32
Main Authors: Oromí-Bosch, Agnès, Kotula, Jonathan W
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antibiotics
Autoimmune diseases
Bacteria
Bacterial diseases
Bacterial infections
Biotechnology industry
Cancer
Cancer therapies
Chemical engineering
Clinical trials
Consortia
Disease
Engineers
Feces
Genetic engineering
Genomes
Infections
Intestine
Microbiota
Microorganisms
Pathogens
Patients
Physicians
Side effects
Tumors
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Summary:Microbes found in our intestines hold great promise as tools to treat human diseases. Genetically engineering gut bacteria is a unique strategy to design controlled and effective living therapeutics. Microbes are emerging as a new a class of medicine to fight human diseases. However, this is not an entirely new concept. In the late 1800s, physicians in Germany and New York noticed that tumors regressed in some of their cancer patients who incidentally acquired a bacterial skin infection while in the hospital. Building on this observation, physicians tested the bold idea of administering the infectious bacteria to cancer patients as a potential cure. Some patients experienced dangerous side effects from the bacterial infections, but amazingly, other patients experienced tumor regression. Here, current strategies for using gut microbes as living therapeutics are discussed while illustrating how genetically engineered commensal gut bacteria offer unique advantages over other strategies and how CRlSPR-Cas9-based tools enable the engineering of those bacteria.
ISSN:0360-7275
1945-0710