Giving Cancer Food Poisoning

Okay, so we’ve all experienced it, the dreaded aftermath of eating under-cooked hamburger meat, or some other form of contaminated food.  You suffer for hours or even days and lament the effect of E. coli on your system.  It’s never pleasant, but what if we could take the same toxins produced by the E. coli that gave you all those food poisoning symptoms and re-direct them to cancer cells?

Well, that’s what some researchers like me have been up to.  We’ve been playing with these naturally effective killers and using them to our advantage.  How? The first step is removing the toxin’s ability to enter healthy cells. This sounds complicated, but it is similar to playing with Lego® blocks.  There are two parts to these toxins: the one responsible for getting it into healthy cells and the part that kills once it gets inside.  The key is to only keep the portion that can kill cells and add a “homing-beacon”.  This way, it’s as though you have a homing missile that will target and kill only cancer cells.  Currently, efforts are underway to extend this approach to clinical trials.

Sound too simple to be true?  Sometimes, the simplest approaches are the most effective.

For an example of researchers targeting E. coli toxins to cancer cells, click here.