Editorial: Microorganisms and their derivatives for cancer therapy

Abstract

[Execerpt] Cancer remains an unsolved and challenging problem. In 1890, Dr. William Bradley Coley attempted to use a mixture of dead microbes to treat cancers (Dobosz and Dzieciatkowski, 2019; Liu et al., 2022), establishing the foundation of bacteria-mediated cancer therapy. Given the recent advances in the study of the human microbiome that revealed its crucial role in tumorigenesis, development, therapy, and prognostic evaluation, additional research efforts on cancer microbial therapies have been conducted (Kurtz et al., 2019; Feng et al., 2022), with new findings supporting the potential role of bacteriolytic therapy in cancer. Our Special Research Topic aimed at exploring the trends and recent advances on the use of microorganisms and their derivatives for cancer therapy, on new anticancer agents, new genetic engineering techniques, and synthetic or new identified bacteria, which could be used for cancer monotherapy or adjuvant therapy, as well as understanding the mechanisms underlying their anticancer effects. [...]