Take a look at the Figure 2 of https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2... It's a live mouse, they inject a tiny amount of cancer cells, wait line a week until they replicate and fro to 200mm3[1], and then inject the bacteria and wait like another week, and the cancer dissapears. All of this while the mouse is alive.
"mouse model" is standard name. It means that is somewhat a model of a human.
[1] Cubic units are too hart to visualize, if it were a perfect sphere, the diameter would be 7mm ~= 1/4 inch.
> The experimental design employed clinically relevant dosing regimens: E. americana was administered as a single intravenous injection via tail vein at a dose of 200 μL (5 × 10⁹ CFU/mL), while anti-PD-L1 and DOX were administered intravenously every other day for four total injections at 2.5 mg/kg, representing standard therapeutic protocols.
This is not to be confused with dismissing with an article-specific argument (which you don't have).
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They tried 9 bacterias and a 1 control group. Using n=3 * (9+1) = 30 mice they got this result:
> Most remarkably, E. americana demonstrated exceptional therapeutic efficacy, achieving potent tumor suppression and complete tumor regression (complete response, CR) following a single bacterial administration. The therapeutic kinetics revealed that mice treated with R. qingshengii exhibited initial tumor suppression up to day 5 post-injection; however, tumor re-growth was subsequently observed, suggesting that while this strain possesses antitumor activity, its therapeutic effects are not sustained long-term.
They claim "p < 0.0001" that in my opinion is a loooot of zeros for only 3 mice.
They end the experiment after 40 days, so it's not clear if the cancer would reappear after a a few months.
They tried again with 5 mice, and got similar results, so it doesn't look like a fluke, but it's a very short time to claim an "elimination" line in the title of the press release. The research article has a more neutral tone.
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It looks like the idea is that these bacterias can survive without oxygen, so they are happy to live in the tumor that usually has a low number of capilar and blood and oxygen. IIUC the bacterias kill the nearby tumor cells, perhaps steal their food and also make the immune system go there and kill everything just in case. This sounds like a sensible idea, but it's too far from my area to be sure.
Granted, the other concerns hold.
Or maybe try it on cats/dogs etc. if they don't want to risk curing humans.
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