Islander
09-19-11, 05:14 PM
Friday, June 2, 2006
By Emily Singer
Scientists are synthetically engineering E. coli that can target and kill cancer cells.
Imagine a bacterium that, when injected into the bloodstream, would travel to the site of a tumor, insert itself into the cancer cell, and then produce a cancer-killing compound. That's exactly what scientists at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have set out to do.
Traditional cancer therapies are limited for two key reasons: little of the drug actually reaches the tumor and the drug is toxic to both cancerous and healthy tissues. Bacteria, however, have the potential to precisely target cells. "In a way, bacteria are the ultimate in smart drugs," says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston (he was not involved in the current work, but will collaborate on the project in the future). "It's hard to pack a lot of intelligence into a small molecule or protein; but bacteria can have sensors and actuators and can drill into a cell, like a submarine."
Read more: https://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16949&ch=biotech
By Emily Singer
Scientists are synthetically engineering E. coli that can target and kill cancer cells.
Imagine a bacterium that, when injected into the bloodstream, would travel to the site of a tumor, insert itself into the cancer cell, and then produce a cancer-killing compound. That's exactly what scientists at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have set out to do.
Traditional cancer therapies are limited for two key reasons: little of the drug actually reaches the tumor and the drug is toxic to both cancerous and healthy tissues. Bacteria, however, have the potential to precisely target cells. "In a way, bacteria are the ultimate in smart drugs," says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston (he was not involved in the current work, but will collaborate on the project in the future). "It's hard to pack a lot of intelligence into a small molecule or protein; but bacteria can have sensors and actuators and can drill into a cell, like a submarine."
Read more: https://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16949&ch=biotech