'Superbugs' join fight against cancer
6 September 2007
GM bacteria could soon be providing targeted cancer treatment and radically improving patients' outlook, say scientists.
Antenna finds out how these good 'superbugs' work...
Image: Cardiff University
Over a quarter of a million people in the UK are diagnosed with cancer every year. So finding more effective ways to treat cancer is a top priority.
Now a team of scientists from the Netherlands and the UK have developed a radically different way to tackle tumours - using bacteria. They've genetically engineered the bugs to become mini cancer-killing machines.
The bacteria growing in a cancer tumour.
Image: Jan Theys
How does the new treatment work?
Inside cancer tumours blood vessels often become damaged, leaving parts of the tumour oxygen free. Without oxygen and properly built blood vessels, treatments like chemo- and radiotherapy don't work that well.
Image: istockphoto.com/drliwa
But clostridium bacteria seek out and thrive in oxygen-free conditions, making them ideal for delivering anti-cancer treatments to where they're needed most.
However, clostridium bacteria on their own only have a few cancer-busting properties. So Jan Theys and his team from the University of Maastricht and the University of Nottingham genetically engineered the bugs to produce a protein toxic to cancer cells.
These are clostridium bacteria spores.
Image: Jan Theys
The bacteria are harmless to normal, non-cancerous cells. Lead researcher Jan explains: 'If you're healthy you don't normally have low-oxygen areas in your body, so the bacteria remain inactive. But a low-oxygen environment encourages the bacteria to grow, and kill off any cancer cells.'
Jan Theys, University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Image: University of Maastricht
This is a breast cancer tumour in close-up. There were 153,491 cancer deaths in 2005 in the UK alone.
An injection of the new bacterial treatment could be used to help treat a wide range of cancer types. And combined with existing cancer therapies it could boost doctors' chances of killing cancer tumours once and for all. |
Image: National Cancer Institute
Now Jan and his team are impatient to get their discovery out of the lab and into patients. So far, they've tested it on mice, but the next stage will be to get clinical trials with real patients under way. |
'If we can get the funding we are pretty confident we can start testing it on patients within five years,' says Jan. 'Then we can start using it for real in combination with other treatments like radiotherapy. We're very eager to start doing this as soon as possible.'
Other experts are hopeful about the new treatment too.
'Being able to direct drugs or gene therapy to the parts of cancers that are hard to treat is an exciting possibility,' says Joanna Owens from Cancer Research UK. 'The big difficulty will be making the leap from the laboratory to the clinic, but we look forward to seeing whether this approach will be successful in clinical trials.'
Joanna Owens, Cancer Research UK
Image: Cancer Research UK