Programmable living therapeutics for cancer immunotherapy

Synthetic biology is reshaping cancer immunotherapy by enabling living therapeutics that sense, compute, and act within tumors. This review categorizes recent advances across three modalities: engineered CAR-T cells, oncolytic bacteria, and oncolytic viruses. For CAR-T cells, small-molecule-, physical-cue-, and tumor-marker-responsive switches enable reversible, dose-dependent, and spatiotemporally confined activation. Engineered bacteria integrate quorum sensing and tumor-microenvironment-responsive logic to control intratumoral colonization, lysis timing, and payload release while limiting systemic exposure. Oncolytic viruses are reprogrammed with tumor-selective promoters, miRNA target modules, and retargeted capsids/ligands to restrict replication, enhance immune stimulation, and improve infection specificity. We further discuss key challenges and future directions toward clinical realization, including circuit complexity, targeting precision, chassis optimization, and cross-platform synergy. Collectively, living therapeutics engineered with synthetic circuits represent a rapidly advancing strategy for precise and safe cancer immunotherapy, with growing potential for clinical translation.