Back to the Future: Are Tumor-Targeting Bacteria the Next-Generation Cancer Therapy?

Cancer patients infected with various bacteria were reported, for at least two centuries, to have spontaneous remission. W.B. Coley, of what is now the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, pioneered bacterial therapy of cancer in the clinic with considerable success beginning in the late nineteenth century. After Coley died in 1936, bacterial therapy of cancer essentially ended. Currently there is much excitement in developing bacterial therapy for treating cancer using either obligate or facultative anaerobic bacteria. This chapter will demonstrate the potential and strategy of Salmonella typhimurium A1-R, an engineered tumor-targeting variant for the systemic treatment of metastatic cancer. A new concept using Salmonella typhimurium A1-R for cell cycle "decoy" chemotherapy of metastatic cancer is also described.