Exploiting lactic acid bacteria for colorectal cancer: a recent update

Abstract

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer in the world. Currently, chemotherapy and radiotherapy used to treat CRC exhibit many side effects, hence, it is an urgent need to design effective therapies to prevent and treat CRC. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) can regulate gut microbiota, intestinal immunity, and intestinal mechanical barrier, which is becoming a hot product for the prevention and treatment of CRC, whereas comprehensive reviews of their anti-CRC mechanisms are limited. This review systematically reveals the latest incidence, mortality, risk factors, and molecular mechanisms of CRC, then summarizes the roles of probiotics in alleviating CRC in animal and clinical studies and critically reviews the possible mechanisms by which these interventions exert their activities. It then shows the limitations in mechanisms and clinical studies, and the suggestions for future research are also put forward, which will play an important role in guiding and promoting the basic and clinical research of remising CRC by LAB and the development of LAB products.

Keywords:

• Clinical research
• colorectal cancer
• lactic acid bacteria
• limitations
• mechanism
• prospect

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 32072227, 32021005, 31820103010), 111 project (BP0719028), the Fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2022M721363), and the Collaborative Innovation Center of Food Safety and Quality Control in Jiangsu Province.