Disease-causing bugs could play a valuable role in the treatment of cancer. Deliberately infecting people with the bacteria that cause listeriosis could increase their ability to destroy tumours. The goal is to kick-start the body’s immune system by “provoking” it with the bacteria, which are modified to trigger an attack on the cancer.
US vaccine company Advaxis chose Listeria monocytogenes because of its ability to stow away in immune cells called antigen-presenting cells (APCs). These cells prime the rest of the immune system to attack a given strain of microbe, say, by showing fragments of antigen from that…
