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Bacterial biofilms associated with CRC
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Bacterial biofilms were found to be associated with certain colorectal cancers, and their microbiota organization may be predictive of cancer risk, according to new research data.
“From a clinical perspective, this work provides insight that colon cancers exhibit clear differences in their microbiota associations and these differences correlate with tissue changes showing activation of oncogenic signaling pathways and outcomes,” Cynthia L. Sears, MD, from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, told Healio Gastroenterology.
Cynthia L. Sears
Jessica Mark Welch, PhD, a scientist from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and colleagues developed combinatorial imaging, “a novel way to ‘see’ microbial community structure that … could potentially be used to clinically diagnose pre-cancerous and cancerous conditions in the ascending colon,” according to the release.
“This is the first time that biofilms have been shown to be associated with colon cancer, to our knowledge,” Mark Welch said in a press release.
Sears and colleagues used this imaging technique to systematically study the microbial communities associated with surgically resected CRC and adenomas compared with paired tumor-free colon tissues at the edge of the surgical margin and colon biopsies from healthy patients undergoing routine screening colonoscopy.
They found invasive polymicrobial bacterial biofilms that were previously linked to nonmalignant intestinal pathology in 89% of right-sided colon tumors (13 of 15 CRCs and 4 of 4 adenomas) compared with 12% of left-sided tumors (2 of 15 CRCs and 0 of 2 adenomas). Furthermore, they found that all patients with biofilm-positive tumors also had biofilms on their tumor-free mucosa.
“This suggests that either the tumor allows the biofilm to form, or the biofilm is helping to cause the tumor,” Mark Welch said. “The breaching of the mucus layer could allow bacteria to come into contact with the host epithelial cells, and that is one thing that could lead to cancer.”
The researchers also observed that biofilms were associated with bacterial tissue invasion and changes in tissue biology with enhanced cellular proliferation, and although microbiome profiling showed no distinct bacterial taxa associated with tumors, it did show that biofilm communities on paired normal mucosa cluster with tumor microbiomes.
“The hypothesis to be tested next is whether detection of biofilms (which requires biopsy and a fixation approach that is not currently routine) is predictive of an individual with increased risk of developing colon neoplasia,” Sears said. “In other words, if a biopsy shows a biofilm, should this be a patient that is more closely evaluated over time? Alternatively, can, for example, probiotic approaches modify colon biofilms and alter risk of colon neoplasia (as one potential therapeutic idea for testing in the future)?”
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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