For a long time, tumors were thought to be sterile environments, devoid of bacterial life. Recent research has challenged this dogma, showing that tumors harbor microbiomes. These bacteria residing inside tumor cells may in fact confer an advantage to tumor cells, a study published today in Cell reports. In mice with breast cancer, intracellular bacteria enhanced tumor cells’ ability to metastasize by improving their survival as they exit the primary tumor.
“The report was phenomenal, very timely, and it follows a lot of the work that we’ve seen this year and the years prior, mounting evidence that tumor microenvironments are not sterile,” says Nadim Ajami, a microbiome researcher in MD Anderson’s Program for Innovative Microbiome and Translational Research who was not involved in the study. The paper also adds to evidence, he says, “that there are differential signals [from the microbiome] and that these signals . . . have some ...
