Engineering S. typhimurium for metastatic colorectal cancer

The engineering of living cells and microbes is a transformative approach to cancer therapy, as cells can be genetically programmed to intelligently sense and respond to environments potentially leading to improved safety and efficacy of therapies. However, the vast number of rapidly engineered therapies far outpaces the throughput of animal-based testing regimes, thus creating a major bottleneck for clinical translation. Leveraging synthetic biology tools and a high-throughput bacteria-spheroid platform, the objective of this proposal is to rapidly optimize tumor-homing S. tyhpimurium to express therapeutics locally and specifically in tumors.