Scientists at Columbia Engineering have developed a new cancer treatment that teams up bacteria and viruses to fight tumors. In findings published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab demonstrated a method in which a virus is concealed inside a bacterium that naturally seeks out tumors. This allows the virus to evade the body’s immune defenses and activate once it reaches the cancer site.

The system takes advantage of each microbe’s strengths: bacteria’s ability to locate and invade tumors and viruses’ ability to infect and destroy cancer cells. The research, led by Tal Danino, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, produced a platform named CAPPSID (short for Coordinated Activity of Prokaryote and Picornavirus for Safe Intracellular Delivery). The team collaborated with Charles M. Rice, a virology expert from The Rockefeller University.

Engineering Microbe Cooperation
“We aimed to enhance bacterial cancer therapy by enabling the bacteria to deliver and activate a therapeutic virus directly inside tumor cells, while engineering safeguards to limit viral spread outside the tumor,” says co-lead author Jonathan Pabón, an MD/PhD candidate at Columbia.

The scientists believe their mouse-based experiments mark the first instance of intentionally engineering bacteria and viruses to work together against cancer.