According to a recent study from Guy's, St. Thomas', and King's College London, some oral bacteria can destroy head and neck cancer cells.
The findings of a study that was published in Cancer Communications, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), the sixth most frequent cancer worldwide, is a terrible kind of disease. There hasn't been any recent progress in its therapy.
As per Guys and St Thomas, researchers may have discovered fresh hope in a bacteria called fusobacterium, which advances colon cancer but prevents it from spreading to the head and neck.
According to this research, these bacteria practically melt head and neck cancer cells, which suggests that their association with cancer is more complicated than previously thought.
Senior author Dr Miguel Reis Ferreira noted that this finding should be considered against their documented function in worsening cancers, including those of the gut.
Data from 155 head and neck cancer patients were evaluated by a global team of scientists under the direction of Dr. Ferreira.
Remarkably, patients with naturally occurring fusobacterium levels higher than those with lower levels had a consistently improved prognosis (Guys & St. Thomas, 2013).
According to The Guardian, their chances of surviving rose by 65 percent.
“In essence, we found that when you find these bacteria within head and neck cancers, they have much better outcomes. The other thing that we found is that in cell cultures this bacterium is capable of killing cancer,” Dr. Ferreira was quoted in the press release from Guys and St. Thomas.
70 to 90 percent of cancer vanished in the laboratory after the bacteria were left in a petri dish containing cancer cells for a few days. It releases poisonous chemicals that kill the tumor.
“You put it in the cancer at very low quantities and it just starts killing it very quickly,” he said according to The Guardian.
Since the fusobacterium promotes cancer growth in the intestines, they anticipated that it would aggravate cancer cells in the head and neck; nevertheless, they may have found a ground-breaking treatment for this kind of cancer instead.
“At the end of a few days it just destroys the cancer completely,” Dr. Ferriera stated.
While the project is still in its early stages, they hope to learn more about how these results might affect patient outcomes for cancers other than head and neck.
It provides new opportunities for experimenting with bacteria that scientists might not have thought to be effective, such as those that stimulate the growth of certain types of cancer but, when given to other types, destroy them.
As the study is still in its early stages, they aim to investigate further the potential effects of these results on patient outcomes related to head and neck cancer as well as other unexplored variations.
It provides new avenues for working with bacteria that scientists might not have thought to be effective, such as those that, when introduced to different types of cancer, may destroy the cancer that the original strain supported.
“Our findings are remarkable and very surprising. We had a eureka moment when we found that our international colleagues also found data that validated the discovery,” Dr Anjali Chander, a senior clinical research fellow at King’s College London and lead author in Guys and St. Thomas.
