STAT December 22, 2021
The holy grail of cancer drug targets is akin to a unicorn horn: a marker that only cancer cells have, clearly distinguishing them from healthy cells. In reality, nearly all cancer drug targets are also found on many healthy cells, leading to serious off-tumor toxicity that — in extreme scenarios — can be fatal.
Synthetic biologist Kobi Benenson might have a way around that. Inside an engineered virus, he and his colleagues at ETH Zurich packaged a programmable genetic circuit that uses multiple targets to build a profile of a cancer cell. Detailed in a mouse study recently published in Science, it’s a nanoscopic biological computer that roams through the body, executing a program that seeks to recognize and kill...
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