The future of medicine is TINY!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Modern medicines are powerful, but getting them where they’re needed most can be a pain. What if you had a needle small enough to inject into individual cells?
Enter Joseph Kreitz and team at M-I-T.
They took inspiration from a nasty bacteria that produces tiny syringes filled with toxins. These microscopic assassins use the syringes to target insect cells. Researchers remodeled these syringes to selectively target cancer cells.
Results? The syringes successfully injected toxins into cancer cells, killing over eighty percent. The syringes ignored non-cancerous cells. Testing them in live mice showed similar results. The syringes only injected the specific cell type they were designed to target!
The researchers anticipate that this method could be safe enough to treat cancer in humans. These nifty needles could have wide ranging uses, like delivering proteins for gene therapy!
These new needles certainly aren’t pointless.
Reference: Kreitz, J., Friedrich, M.J., Guru, A. et al. Programmable protein delivery with a bacterial contractile injection system. Nature 616, 357–364 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05870-7