Engineered Bacterial “Syringes” Can Deliver Drugs Into Human Cells
Originally published by Rohini Subrahmanyam, PhD, on Apr 20, 2023 Researchers repurpose tiny bacterial injection systems to specifically inject a wide variety of proteins into human cells and living mice. S ophisticated, e ffective drugs to treat diseases and other conditions aren’t any good if they can’t reach the part of the body or the specific cells that they’re designed to target. However, scientists have found a new way to deliver tiny proteins into specific cells, using small syringelike structures naturally found on certain bacteria . The study, published in Nature on March 29, could lead to better drug-delivery systems in medicine. “Delivery remains a critical bottleneck in medicine,” said study coauthor and MIT researcher Joseph Kreitz . “Although many powerful new therapies have been developed over the past several decades, we will need a deep bench of options to get these therapies into the right cells in the body.” In the study, Kreitz, Broad Institu...