Question: Have you come any closer to a cure for cancer?

Clare Taylor answered on 12 Nov 2012:

My research is probably a little way off a cure yet. We’re trying to use bacteria to target tumour cells but before we can do that medically we need to be sure that we understand everything we can about how the bacteria normally interact inside the body. My bacteria are Salmonella and they normally cause infections in humans so we need to make sure that we disable the bacteria so that they are no longer harmful but so that they would still be able to target the tumour properly. Also, it wouldn’t be the bacteria themselves that cure cancer – the idea is that we would use the bacteria to deliver some kind of biological cancer-fighting molecule, like a protein. To do that we would need to insert a foreign gene into the bacteria that would be switched when the bacteria reach the tumour cell. This would mean that the protein is only switched on inside the tumour and the healthy cells outside wouldn’t be affected. But of course, we would need to make sure that the foreign gene inside the bacteria would work properly and make protein so we still have a lot of research to do before we could safely use this as a therapy for cancer. We’re working hard at it though!