Schematic of the microfluidic device used to co-culture engineered bacteria and cancer cells (top). Live co-culture of engineered bacteria and cancer cells immediately before and after the synchronized lysis event, showing cancer cell death (bottom left, right, respectively).JEFF HASTY, UC SAN DIEGOA synthetic genetic circuit programmed into an attenuated Salmonella enterica subspecies can be used to systemically deliver an anti-tumor toxin into mice with cancer. The circuit allows the bacterial cells inside a tumor to synchronously self-destruct by lysis, releasing the toxin directly in the tumor. The treatment of mice with the engineered bacteria is described by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), today (July 20) in Nature, pointing to a way to harness bacteria for cancer drug delivery.
“This impressive study represents a big step towards one of the great dreams of synthetic biology: rationally programming cells, in this case bacteria, to exhibit complex, dynamic, and beneficial behaviors in a host organism,” Michael Elowitz, whose Caltech lab builds synthetic genetic circuits and who was not involved in the work, wrote in an email to The Scientist.
Bert Vogelstein, a cancer geneticist at the Johns Hopkins’ Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore who also was not involved in the work, agreed. “This paper describes a highly innovative strategy employing synthetic biology to weaponize bacteria and shows that these bacteria can be used to slow the growth of tumors growing in mice,” he wrote in an email to The Scientist.
The idea of using bacteria ...
