Bacterial ‘Nanosyringe’ Could Deliver Gene Therapy to Human Cells

March 29, 2023

(Scientific American) – In a paper published today in Nature, researchers report refashioning Photorhabdus’s syringe—called a contractile injection system—so that it can attach to human cells and inject large proteins into them. The work could provide a way to deliver various therapeutic proteins into any type of cell, including proteins that can “edit” the cell’s DNA. “It’s a very interesting approach,” says Mark Kay, a gene therapy researcher at Stanford University who was not involved in the study. “Where I think it could be very useful is when you want to express proteins that can do genome editing” to correct or knock out a gene that is mutated in a genetic disorder, he says. (Read More)