Cancer is something that has impacted all of us either directly or indirectly and is a leading cause of death globally. As a result, there is an urgent and ongoing need to discover and develop new treatments to tackle this disease more efficiently.

Interestingly, most of the small-molecule drugs that have been approved as cancer treatments over the past 40 years have come from chemical compounds discovered in a natural product, and bacteria have proven to be a vital source of substances for drug discovery, so it could be that there are more to be discovered from bacteria that have anti-cancer properties.

Researchers from the MRC Toxicology Unit have developed a new experimental approach that could be utilised for identifying new potential bacteria-derived molecules that selectively target cancer cells without affecting healthy cells.

‘The Pioneer platform: A novel approach for selection of selective anti-cancer cytotoxic activity in bacteria through co-culturing with engineered human cells’ was published on 6th June 2023 in the journal PLoS ONE. Read the full publication here.