Engineered Microbes in Therapeutics: Harnessing Bacteria to Boost Immunity and Deliver Targeted Treatments

Synthetic biology is rapidly expanding the use of microorganisms as therapeutic agents, with scientists engineering bacteria and other microbes to modulate immunity, sense disease signals, and deliver targeted drugs or biomolecules at the right site and time. Despite major advances across medicine, many conditions remain difficult to treat with conventional approaches (e.g., systemic small molecules, biologics, surgery, or radiation), motivating the development of innovative, programmable treatment platforms. Recent work shows that genetically reprogrammed microbes can function as living therapeutics: they can interact dynamically with host tissues, reshape immune responses, and complement existing treatment modalities. Their intrinsic behaviors—such as motility, chemotaxis, and the ability to colonize specific niches (including hypoxic or inflamed microenvironments)—make them promising tools for localized delivery and sustained activity. Because microbial genomes are readily engineered, these platforms can be designed for selective targeting, controlled payload release, improved safety via built-in “kill switches,” and enhanced compatibility with other therapeutic strategies. Engineered live microbial therapeutics are now entering and progressing through clinical evaluation across multiple indications, helping establish practical frameworks for safety, dosing, administration routes, and scalable manufacturing. These studies will also clarify where living therapeutics provide the most benefit as stand-alone interventions versus in combination with established therapies. While regulatory and translational hurdles remain, early clinical experiences and preclinical data underscore the promise of this approach. We welcome submissions in which microbes are actively utilized for therapeutic purposes across diverse disease areas. Contributions may employ a wide range of experimental and computational approaches, including genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, biogeochemical/functional assays, bioinformatics, and animal or human models. With collective research and powerful omics-based discovery and analysis, engineered microbes are increasingly recognized as a versatile—and previously underused—source of therapeutic solutions for some of medicine’s most challenging diseases. This Research Topic welcomes both original research and review articles on engineered microbes and microbial products as therapeutic modalities, including (but not limited to):-Discovery and characterization of novel microbes (e.g., gut/skin/oral or environmental isolates) that influence host health and therapeutic outcomes-Biophysical and biochemical characterization of microbes or microbial products (e.g., biomolecules, metabolites, vesicles) with therapeutic potential-Microbe-enabled vaccine design and immunomodulation strategies (bacterial, viral, or microbial-component platforms)-Engineered microbes for targeted delivery of therapeutics (small molecules, biologics, cytokines, RNA, enzymes, gene-editing tools)-Therapeutic applications across disease contexts (e.g., cancer, infectious disease, inflammatory/autoimmune disease, metabolic disease)-Novel methods for microbial therapeutics, including chassis selection, circuit design, biosensing, containment, and safety controls-Repurposing or “hijacking” microbes to treat disease (including synthetic consortia and microbiome-informed therapeutics)-Combination strategies pairing engineered microbial therapeutics with conventional treatments (e.g., drugs, biologics, immunotherapies, radiation, surgery) Topic editors: Alessia Faggian, Nitin Kamble Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81322/engineered-microbes-in-therapeutics-harnessing-bacteria-to-boost-immunity-and-deliver-targeted-treatments