Patent controversies and court cases: cancer diagnosis, therapy and prevention

Current advances in microbial-based cancer therapies

Microbes have an immense metabolic capability and can adapt to a wide variety of environments; as a result, they share complicated relationships with cancer. The goal of microbial-based cancer therapy is to treat patients with cancers that are not easily treatable, by using tumor-specific infectious microorganisms. Nevertheless, a number of difficulties have been encountered as a result of the harmful effects of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and alternative cancer therapies, such as the toxicity to non-cancerous cells, the inability of medicines to penetrate deep tumor tissue, and the ongoing problem of rising drug resistance in tumor cells. Due to these difficulties, there is now a larger need for designing alternative strategies that are more effective and selective when targeting tumor cells. The fight against cancer has advanced significantly owing to cancer immunotherapy. The researchers have greatly benefited from their understanding of tumor-invading immune cells as well as the immune responses that are specifically targeted against cancer. Application of bacterial and viral cancer therapeutics offers promising potential to be employed as cancer treatments among immunotherapies. As a novel therapeutic strategy, microbial targeting of tumors has been created to address the persisting hurdles of cancer treatment. This review outlines the mechanisms by which both bacteria and viruses target and inhibit the proliferation of tumor cells. Their ongoing clinical trials and possible modifications that can be made in the future have also been addressed in the following sections. These microbial-based cancer medicines have the ability to suppress cancer that builds up and multiplies in the tumor microenvironment and triggers antitumor immune responses, in contrast to other cancer medications.

Bacterial proteins and peptides in cancer therapy: today and tomorrow

Cancer is one of the most deadly diseases worldwide. In the last three decades many efforts have been made focused on understanding how cancer grows and responds to drugs. The dominant drug-development paradigm has been the "one drug, one target." Based on that, the two main targeted therapies developed to combat cancer include the use of tyrosine kinase inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies. Development of drug resistance and side effects represent the major limiting factors for their use in cancer treatment. Nowadays, a new paradigm for cancer drug discovery is emerging wherein multi-targeted approaches gain ground in cancer therapy. Therefore, to overcome resistance to therapy, it is clear that a new generation of drugs is urgently needed. Here, regarding the concept of multi-targeted therapy, we discuss the challenges of using bacterial proteins and peptides as a new generation of effective anti-cancer drugs.

Clinical application of amplicon-based next-generation sequencing in cancer

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology has revolutionized genomic research by decreasing the cost of sequencing while increasing the throughput. The focus now is on potential clinical applications of NGS technology for diagnostics and therapeutics. Clinical applications of NGS in cancer can detect clinically actionable genetic/genomic alterations that are critical for cancer care. These alterations can be of diagnostic, prognostic, or therapeutic significance. In certain cancers, patient risk and prognosis can be predicted based on the mutation profile identified by NGS. Many targeted therapies have been developed for cancer patients who bear specific mutations; however, choosing the right NGS technique for the appropriate clinical application can be challenging, especially in clinical oncology, where the material for NGS tests is often limited and the turnaround time (TAT) for cancer tests is constrained to a few days. Currently, amplicon-based NGS approaches have emerged as the best fit for clinical oncology. In this review, we focus on amplicon-based library preparation, sequencing, sequence data alignment and annotation, and post-analytic interpretation and reporting.