Targeting Clonal Mutations in Solid Tumors with Personalized Oncolytic Microbes

Immunotherapy has shown much promise for blood cancers, which may all be treatable or curable soon, especially if hematopoietic stem cells are harvested and frozen ahead of time for each individual. However, solid tumors are still extremely difficult to treat. Immunotherapy has helped in some instances for solid tumors, e.g., melanoma, and may eventually be able to cure all solid tumors for reasons that are a bit unclear currently. There may be a more direct way to treat solid tumors, though. I have written multiple articles about targeting truncal, i.e., clonal, mutations in solid tumors as a means of eliminating them. This would be a treatment specific to each patient. However, in my earlier work, I was under the impression that there may only be a handful of clonal mutations in an average solid tumor patient. After further investigation, it seems that instead of just several, there could be thousands of clonal mutations on average in a solid tumor patient. This may essentially ensure that all of a solid tumor patient’s cancer cells could be targeted.