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Previus discussion (from the university press release) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 (498 points | 6 months ago | 140 comments) I'll rehash my comment
They used mice, because they are good for early tries. The researchers had 9 bacterias and only 1 was successful. Experiments in mice are cheaper and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans. (Hey! They even injected the cancer cells in mice and waited a week until it grow. Nobody will approve something like that in humans.)
The title claims that the tumos were eradicated. The title hides that it was a small tumor they injected in the mice and more importantly that it disappeared for two weeks until the experiment ended. It's difficult to guess if it will be useful for humans with bigger tumors because they are harder to detect, and it would work for a interesting enough period like 5 years.
There is also and old comment by octaane https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308732 I'll quote it partially:
> Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote:
>> "This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)"
> PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are PD-L1 positive. [...] Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive.
> Doxy is an ancient SOC chemo.
> [...]
I disagree that the title "hides" that the title was small and that it disappeared for two weeks. The surviving contingent on the E. americana strain was evaluated for 60 days, and the tumor doesn't look particularly small based on the picture on page 8 of the paper. I think the study size is small (n=5) so we'd like to see more large-scale studies next, but it's already a strong result to show 5/5 (100%) at p < 0.0001 for multiple primary endpoints and the absence of success from comparable bacteria is helpful to frame future research. The absence of long-term side effects and only transient weight-loss followed by 15-day weight gain is also intriguing. I'm not a doctor, oncologist, or cancer researcher, but the methodology looks sound and appropriate to me, as does the title, based on reading the paper.
> and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans
More like, what's a mouse gonna do about it?
Moneyshot:
> The three bacterial strains that successfully induced tumor regression (E. americana, C. portucalensis, and E. ludwigii) were all identified as facultative anaerobic bacteria.
> This finding is consistent with established principles of bacterial cancer therapy, as anaerobic bacteria possess the unique capability to selectively accumulate and colonize within solid tumors due to the characteristically hypoxic and immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment.
> This selective tumor colonization likely enabled efficient intratumoral bacterial proliferation and, in conjunction with activated immune cell responses, contributed significantly to the observed tumor regression phenomena.
Said in other words, the tumours created the ideal environment for anaerobic bacteria to multiply. Eventually causing a reaction from the body’s own immune response (which ignored the tumour but successfully detected the bacterial growth).
So one of the reasons this worked well was that the bacteria acted as a target for the immune cells, and they proliferated inside the tumour thus weakening it.
I think you overestimate the "interesting enough period". How much would it be worth for some patients to go into remission for a year? or even 6 months? The answer is a lot
Don't know about mice, but rats more or less have a 50% tumor/cancer chance if they really do get to live 1+ years. I think for some lines it goes up to 90%+.
The world would be a smarter place if every study and resulting news article were required by law to include something like this at the top.
Cant it be just some immunity reaction induced by the bacteria what would not translate to humans?
They say:
> Outperforming chemotherapy and immunotherapy
And then later:
> As a facultative anaerobe, it preferentially accumulates within the hypoxic tumor microenvironment, where it rapidly proliferates and exerts direct cytotoxic effects while simultaneously activating a broad immune response. Within hours, tumors become infiltrated with T cells, B cells, and neutrophils, accompanied by surges in key inflammatory cytokines like TNF-α and IFN-γ.
So this is immunotherapy. Although it is clever immunotherapy. Gut bacteria doesn't usually survive long in the bloodstream because there's too much oxygen present (that's part of why it's gut bacteria, its unlikely to go all Leeroy Jenkins on the rest of the organism).
The TME is often so densely packed with growth that its less oxidative than surrounding tissue. So the bacteria that don't find a tumor don't last long enough to cause problems and the ones that do find one see it as a bit of a refuge from the problematic environment and colonize it specifically, throwing off whatever subterfuge the tumor was using to keep the immune system from getting involved.
It's a bit like throwing a brick through the window of a bank that was being quietly robbed by somebody else. The cops show up and realize they've been overlooking a separate problem.
I kid you not, there was a movie with Sean Connery called "Medicine Man" (1992) with this exact same theme.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104839/?ref_=fn_t_1
In it, Connery finds what looks to be a rare natural cure to all cancer in the Rain Forest (spoiler: not a frog, but equally as weird), and is literally battling the nearby deforesting and bulldozers. For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre (As a young teen, I saw it in the theaters.. quite a bit less action than a 007 movie but good drama and dramatic Sean Connery acting).
I've seen the movie several times. In Italian, the title was translated simply as Mato Grosso, which makes it oddly geographically specific. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Connery definitely starred in even weirder movies. Have you seen Zardoz?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmI2NjI2OWYtMzU5NS00...
>For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre
Buddy, if you're trying to tell me it's weirder than Darby O'Gill and the Little People, I am going to need more than Sir Connery in a ponytail.
Very cool research. They just injected mice with 45 different bacterial strains, and then isolated and cultivated the ones that had the best performance. It seems that it might be quite easy to cultivate these strains to target different tumors / specific tumor samples.
Ewingella Americana itself is a quite common bacterial species, but it seems that the effective strain is the frog-derived and cultivated one. So don't go injecting yourself with a random E. Americana.
Full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2...
The blog is highly suspect, but the study is real. That said it’s not a big deal.
Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.
So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.
> Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation
If it never works as well if at all in humans, maybe mice are too different?
When my mother was fighting cancer, I recall the many disappointments of finding research shrinking tumours in animal models, only to find out the human research showing it didnt work in humans. This was in the 2010s, before llms, but when google search actually searched the web. Then, once you found something that seemed to work in humans, you were hit with the realization that ‘cancer’ is an umbrella term, and you need to account for cell type, and its numerous mutations.. I think the best approach is to collect a sample of the cancer, genotype it, test it against all known anticancer compounds, similar to how you’d deal with a bacterial infection sample, and then hope that the compound that worked for that specific cancer cell will work inside the human
Mice are having a great year
To give more credit to this blog post, the NIH published findings on this same subject last year.
I wonder if animals have always seen frogs as unpleasant medicine they need to eat occasionally. My dog would happily scarf them down if I let him. Or does it have to be IV administered?
Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"?
There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.
The blog articles (6 weeks old) describes this as new, but the linked paper is closer to 6 months old. Random report of the same bacteria giving a chemo patient sepsis: https://www.cureus.com/articles/342789-sepsis-caused-by-ewin... which seems unfortunate
100 years of trying everything to kill bacteria, and we find they can be jolly useful
We are destroying ecosystems so fast that there will be no frogs and we will regret it. The same with all the nature
Bryan Johnson might be interested in IV’ing frog gut bacteria.
Wow, this is humorous .. whats next, the eye of the newt cures wistfulness? I sure hope so.
Seriously though, we are living in an era where the more the science broadens its horizons, the more it just looks like plain ol' witchcraft.
I'm hoping there'll be some uses for figs we haven't thought of, next ..
Crank blog, very skeptical
rest of the site has the usual "cooker" insane brainrot ivermectin, etc crap
This is reminiscent of Coley's Toxins[1], an early experimental cancer treatment using Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. Coley and other practitioners claimed some substantial success, but the mechanism of action was not understood, and the treatment varied so much that scientific verification was elusive.
(Note: I am affiliated with the linked website, but I didn't write the article in question)
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/coleys-cancer-killing-concoc...
The website is misnamed, it should be called thefecalpoints.com
Wow amazing. I am very curious how the spider "learns" to do this technique, that it works, and to repeat it. Is this somehow encoded in the DNA of the spider? Clearly spiders don't rear their children or learn / communicate so it must be evolved and encoded somewhere in either the genes or the epigenetics. Nature is amazing.
The AI- generated diagram is plausible but horribly wrong the more you look at it. Thank goodness the original paper didn’t use that, it’s just this awful blog post that makes the research look like slop.
McCullough’s outlet (Nicolas Hulscher writes for the McCullough Foundation) has a track record of overselling single-study preclinical results with breathless framing… and mice are basically clones of one another. Interesting but not a game changer.
Eat more fiber and fermented foods yo
So the Bursar at Unseen University was on to something this whole time? And we all thought was mad!
Maybe a bit of CPMV (Cowpea Mosaic Virus) for the cancer too ah?
CPMV for Cancer.
Cowpeas are also known as Black-Eyed Peas; which are regarded as good luck and used to be in pastures and thereby human diets.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46283089
Never been a better time to be a mouse
Great news for mice everywhere.
Before anybody gets too excited they should check out some of the other reporting on that site, such as "COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection" and "Trump Signed a Directive to Accelerate 6G Deployment to Operate "Implantable Technologies"
Mice are so goddam healthy.
They get all the good medical breakthroughs.
Sorry but the site looks too sensationalist for me.
Is there any other source?
A single dose of a high velocity bullet also eradicates 100% of tumors.
It's like ozempic all over again! God bless the reptiles
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1217/
Now do Astrocytoma.
lol
I'm astounded that this thread doesn't contain at least one 'eat the frog' joke.