Pearls collections: What we can learn about infectious disease and cancer

[...]a contribution by Cattaneo and Russell probes the use and potential of viruses to treat cancer, using as an example a remarkable success story on the use of the measles vaccine to treat multiple myeloma [11]. [...]Koh [18] discusses the perturbations of the microbiota due to aggressive prophylactic antibiotic therapy and the effects of these perturbations on the treatment of cancer patients and other individuals undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplants. [...]the inflammation induced by infections is usually transient, so efforts have also focused on prompting a long-term cytolytic T lymphocyte response. Because of their ability to survive in antigen-presenting cells, the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes and Salmonella enterica have been genetically manipulated to deliver tumor antigens to the immune system [34]. [...]both viruses and bacteria are now being harnessed for oncolytic therapy against cancer, in which their selective infection of the tumor bed can induce new immune responses to the cancer as well as the pathogen, which is thought to be an important adjunct for immunotherapy as covered in a recent review in PLOS Pathogens [36].