Development of modern medicine has greatly increased human life expectancy and quality of life. Where a hundred years ago a cold could be deadly, we can now cure complex infections. Some diseases unfortunately still have no cure, or an ineffective and painful one. One of these diseases is cancer, which is currently the second leading cause of human death worldwide, killing 10 million people yearly. [1]
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, yet treatment options remain severely constrained. [2] The current therapies like radiation or chemotherapy cause many harmful side effects, since they not only kill cancerous, but also healthy cells. This causes the well-known effects like weight loss and hair loss. They are also not always as effective and sometimes do not fully cure a patient, causing the tumor to return. We therefore felt it was time to create a new treatment.
The past years immunotherapy has gained more attention for it’s potential to help cure diseases like cancer. [3] We wanted to make use of this attention. We are therefore developing a treatment using genetically engineered bacterial components to create a personalized and modular immunotherapy against lung cancer.
