Benoit Rousseau: This study pave the way for microbiome–immunotherapy interventions in GI cancers and vaccine strategies targeting intratumoral bacteria.

Benoit Rousseau, Assistant Attending Physician and Assistant Lab Member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, made the following post on LinkedIn:

“Thrilled to see our work published today in Nature Biotechnology! I would like to congratulate the fantastic investigators we collaborated with from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Leaf Huang Menglin Wang and many others!

In this study, we found evidence that targeting intratumoral bacteria such as Fusobacterium nucleatum in colon cancer mice tumors using liposome loaded antibiotics leads to the release of bacterial neoantigens eliciting an anti-tumor CD8+ T cells response. Bacterial epitopes favored T cell priming contributing to immune recognition of both infected and uninfected cancer cells.

In a nationwide cohort of localized colon cancer patients originating from the French Institut national du cancer database, we found that preresection intake of antibiotics targeting anaerobic bacteria was associated with a significant decrease in the risk of recurrence or death compared to other antibiotics or no antibiotics.

This effect was limited to preresection intake suggesting that the quantity of intratumoral bacteria to prime immunity may be crucial to success. Dedicated prospective studies categorizing intratumoral bacteria, the optimal timing and impact of antibiotics are needed before clinical implementation.

This study pave the way for microbiome–immunotherapy interventions in GI cancers and vaccine strategies targeting intratumoral bacteria.

I would like also to thank the outstanding team of Institut national du cancer Inès Khati, Christine Le Bihan, Philippe Bousquet and Marc Hilmi, and my Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center colleagues Michael Foote Oliver Artz, PhD for their support.”

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Source: Benoit Rousseau/LinkedIn