Engineering Gut Bacteria as Living Therapeutics

• 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
• ISSN: 0360-7275; 1945-0710

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.