Sept. 29 (UPI) — Fungi are discovered in human tumors and may one day be used as a tool to detect, diagnose and even treat cancer.
The findings were in the journal Cell.
Previous has long focused on the relationship between cancer and individual microbes, according to a news release.
The researchers said they discovered “significant correlations” between fungi and age, tumor subtypes, smoking, reaction to immunotherapy and measures of survival.
But they said we had yet to decide whether the fungi were causally related.
“It’s unexpected because we don’t know how fungi can enter tumors throughout the body,” Knight said. Bacteria and fungi interact as components of a complex community. “
The location that fungi are commonly found in human tumors “should prompt us to further explore their potential effects and reexamine almost everything we know about cancer through a ‘microbiome lens,'” said Dr. Ravid Straussman, a correspondent for the examiner and a senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. said in the statement.
A separate study, also in Thursday’s factor of the journal Cell, found the involvement of fungi in gastrointestinal and lung tumors.
Anders B. Dohlman, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is the correspondent of this study.
In lung cancers, for example, Blastomyces was linked to tumor tissue, said the researchers involved in this study. In abdominal cancers, there were higher grades of Candida; and in colon cancers, the presence of Candida helped wait for the spread of the disease.
Knowledge from these studies implicates the mycobiota in the progression of human gastrointestinal cancers and recommends that “tumor-related fungal DNA possibly serve as a diagnostic or prognostic biomarker,” the scientists said.