A Gulp of Genetically Modified Bacteria Might Someday Treat a Range of Illnesses

March 11, 2019

(NPR) – The bacteria Reeder is helping test are part of a new field of medical research that has emerged from two realms of biomedical science. One is the study of the human microbiome, the microbes that inhabit our bodies. The other is synthetic biology, a field that looks at genetically engineering living organisms, including bacteria in the human gut.
“It’s a new world of being able to use synthetic biology to program microbes to treat diseases, which I believe is the future,” says Pamela Silver, a synthetic biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.