Because most people are vaccinated against tetanus as children, delivering benign bacteria carrying a tetanus antigen into pancreatic tumors makes them visible to memory cells in the immune system, researchers report.
Researchers are engineering microbes to deliver therapeutics specifically to tumors, maximizing the treatments’ efficacy while minimizing side effects.
Autonomous, living microrobots that seek and destroy cancer are not as futuristic as one might imagine, thanks to a fusion of robotics and synthetic biology.