Chemists recruit anthrax to deliver cancer drugs
Chemists recruit anthrax to deliver cancer drugs
Bacillus
anthracis bacteria have very efficient machinery for injecting toxic
proteins into cells, leading to the potentially deadly infection known
as anthrax. A team of MIT researchers has now hijacked that delivery
system for a different purpose: administering cancer drugs.
"Anthrax toxin is a professional at delivering large enzymes into
cells," says Bradley Pentelute, the Pfizer-Laubauch Career Development
Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT. "We wondered if we could render
anthrax toxin nontoxic, and use it as a platform to deliver antibody
drugs into cells."In a paper appearing in the journal ChemBioChem, Pentelute and colleagues showed that they could use this disarmed version of the anthrax toxin to deliver two proteins known as antibody mimics, which can kill cancer cells by disrupting specific proteins inside the cells. This is the first demonstration of effective delivery of antibody mimics into cells, which could allow researchers to develop new drugs for cancer and many other diseases, says Pentelute, the senior author of the paper.
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