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A Gut Feeling: Could Salmonella Bacteria Kill Intestinal Tumors?
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Ms. Rasika Pawar*
Email: rasikapawarchm@gmail.com
All of us might not be excited about growing a year older, but we love celebrating birthdays, especially a milestone birthday? As my mother approached her 60th birthday, I proudly posted on her birthday cake, “She’s not 60, she’s 18 with 42 years of experience.”
Soon she was scheduled for a colonoscopy when basic medicines failed to relieve her bowel discomfort. She had lost quite a bit of weight along with constipation. As she lay on the bed, the endoscope made its way through the large intestine, and I could see the insides of the intestine on the screen.
The doctor’s reaction in the next moment told me more than he intended to sayb I saw a large obstruction.
It was a rectal tumor more than 2 cm in
diameter. A cancer diagnosis, no matter the stage, age, or nature of the disease, can bring about a slew of questions and feelings of unpredictability. So, my world came crashing down around me, with deep thinking about the underlying question—can there be an alternative approach for uprooting the limitations of existing therapies?
Radiotherapy (RT) and chemotherapy (CT) are two mainstay therapies in oncology. Although these therapies are widely used, a major limitation lies in the fact that hypoxic colorectal cancer cells are resistant to RT and CT (two times more resistant to ionizing radiations). Besides incomplete cancer cell killing, inadequate tumor invasion, and constrained cytotoxicity to all cancer cells, these treatments are toxic to normal tissues.
* Ms. Rasika Pawar, PhD Scholar from Smt. Chandibai Himathmal Mansukhani College, University of Mumbai, Maharashtra, is pursuing her research on “Studies on Biofilm Forming Lactic Acid Bacteria with Probiotic Potential”. Her popular science story entitled “A Gut Feeling: Could Salmonella Bacteria Kill Intestinal Tumors?” has been selected for AWSAR