Bacteriophage Therapy to Combat Cancer

Summary

Cancer has been a monumental challenge for humanity for ages. Because of its constantly mutating nature, scientists continue to struggle with finding lasting solutions. Treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have made progress, but they share a major flaw: low specificity. These approaches often damage healthy tissue alongside the tumor, making recovery harder and the process more dangerous.

Phages are extremely specific viruses that only target bacteria. They have achieved great successes against bacterial infections but due to their high specificity they are naturally useless against eukaryotic cells such as cancer. However, scientists have developed ways to work around this. Using phage display technology, phages can be engineered to display peptides on their capsids. These peptides can bind to specific receptors and perform specific actions which ensures that the phage only affects and binds to cancer cells. Once bound they can serve many purposes such as therapeutic gene delivery, immune stimulation, and drug delivery. The possibilities they bring are extraordinary. This project explores the novel applications of phage therapy in cancer.

Phage Therapy
(Figure representation created by the author:Omesh Cholan)

Impact Statement

Participating in Elio profoundly expanded my understanding of molecular biology, cancer biology, and therapeutic data science technologies. I explored important biological processes like DNA splicing, lysosome degradation and more. I also developed crucial research skills. During the afternoon sessions, I learned about so many powerful and useful tools such as the protein atlas, pubmed, omim, ncbi, uniprot, and more; these tools will continue to be useful to me in my future studies. My project explored the use of engineered bacteriophages to selectively bind to HER2-positive cancer cells and deliver therapeutic DNA sequences. This concept is very relevant to today's challenges because it addresses the fact that current cancer treatments lack specificity. Phages are something I've been interested in for a while and at Elio I got to explore their potential in cancer treatment. The program showed me that groundbreaking innovation comes with deep research and deep analysis. I am really glad that I got the opportunity to participate in this program.

By: Omesh Cholan. The opinions expressed here are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Elio Academy.

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