Question: How does your work contribute the the curing of cancer, and more specifically, which kinds of cancer?

Clare Taylor answered on 12 Nov 2012:

We’re trying to use bacteria to specifically target tumour cells rather than normal healthy cells. Research done by other scientists has shown that Salmonella bacteria prefer the environment inside tumour cells because the environment inside is deprived of oxygen (the scientific term is hypoxic). Being inside this kind of environment would be beneficial to the bacteria because they wouldn’t have to compete with other bacteria for nutrients to grow. Salmonella is pretty clever, it can survive with or without oxygen and it can actively invade cells so it is the perfect bacterium to target tumours. We are trying to understand what happens when Salmonella are put into a hypoxic environment to make sure that we could control what happens. Normally Salmonella would make people ill so we would also have to disable the bacteria so that they would be harmless and again, we need to make sure we understand what would happen inside the body and tumour cell. Lastly, the bacteria themselves would not cure cancer so we would need to insert foreign genes into the bacteria to deliver the therapeutic proteins. So. we’ve still got a lot to do but we are making progress! At the moment, I couldn’t say what type of cancer we might be able to treat – we would have to do lots of tests first but generally we would be targeting solid tumours. I have seen some research by others which showed that Salmonella can target prostate tumours so that might be a good starting point!