BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

Armed & Dangerous

August 28, 2008 7:00 AM UTC

Researchers at the Burnham Institute for Medical Researchare taking a second shot at exploiting Salmonella's tumor-homing ability to develop cancer therapies. In work reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, they armed an attenuated strain of Salmonella with a proapoptotic cytokine and showed the strain's therapeutic activity in mouse cancer models.1 But given the failure of similar strategies in the past, it remains to be seen whether any companies will pick up the baton and in-license the revamped technology.

It has been known for over a century that certain facultative anaerobic bacteria-bacteria capable of growing with or without oxygen-are able to preferentially home in on tumors when injected intravenously, establish themselves, replicate and inhibit tumor growth.2...