Fight same with same: scientists injected a drug into a cancer cell with the help of salmonella bacteria

One of the most difficult tasks in the treatment of oncological diseases, as you know, is the way to deliver the drug directly to the tumor, so that other organs and tissues do not suffer. This is a very complex process, for which, as a rule, it is necessary to synthesize several types of protein at once. Scientists from the University of Massachusetts seem to have solved this problem, and in a very unusual way - they were delivered by a bacterium that causes another, extremely unpleasant disease - salmonellosis, according to the world's leading scientific journal Nature.

The pathogenic bacteria salmonella are able to penetrate the cell of the human body in order to parasitize there, multiplying in special vacuoles. Scientists have modified the protein responsible for generating components for cell penetration, altering the salmonella bacteria to increase its penetration rate. In addition, they introduced a special substance into the DNA of the bacteria that activates certain genes so that this dangerous bacterium does not damage the tissues of the body, but works exclusively inside the cell itself. There were also placed the genes that are responsible for the self-destruction of the bacteria after it synthesizes a special substance to fight the tumor. Experiments on mice showed that the drug delivered in this way into the tumor did not accumulate in healthy organs and did not infect them. And the result of the application of the new system was the slowing down of tumor growth in mice and the prevention of metastases in them.