Neil Forbes is using something most people associate with sickness, salmonella bacteria, to work toward a cure for one of today’s most prominent health concerns, cancer.

Forbes, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts, is working off of earlier research that showed the salmonella bacteria accumulate in cancerous tumors.

Since then scientists have been able to engineer the bacteria to make it harmless. This paved the way for Forbes’s research by using the bacteria to deliver a toxic payload to tumors where conventional chemotherapy is unable to reach.

Forbes explains that because traditional chemotherapy travels through the bloodstream and kills cancerous cells wherever it finds them, it is less effective the further the tumor is away from blood vessels. Also, chemotherapy seeks out and kills rapidly dividing cells by interfering with that dividing process, and is not just limited to cancerous tumors.

His research, “targeted intratumoral therapeutic delivery,” calls for the engineers to use the bacteria to seek out tumors, and then deliver a toxin that kills them.

Forbes said the damage to the rest of the body will be minimal because once the engineer gets the bacteria to the tumor, radiation can be used to make them produce the toxin, rather than just having them constantly produce a tumor-killing agent.

“If you’re able to do small amount of damage to the bacteria, they’ll respond to that and you can take the receptor that responds to damage and hook it up to your drug,” said Forbes. “And almost every cancer facility already has directed radiation technology on site, so we don’t have to re-invent the wheel.”

Forbes has also found some evidence that bacteria could be useful in treating metastasized cancer, which could give more hope to the hard-to-treat, late-stage cancer patients.

He also said there are a number of reasons salmonella accumulates in tumors that are not completely understood. But tumors can act like filters, trapping bacteria in them, and because they have fewer immune cells than the rest of the body, the tumors are vulnerable. In addition, the inside of a tumor has the perfect conditions for bacteria to grow and multiply.

“You’ll inject on the order of millions of bacteria, but eventually in the tumor it will be on the order of billions, so they’ll replicate quite a lot in a few days,” said Forbes.

Forbes says although the ability of bacteria to accumulate in cancer has been known since the 1880s, the first research wasn’t done until a few decades ago, and focused mostly on strains of bacteria that find tumors because they seek out places with little or no oxygen in the body.

Salmonella finds tumors in a completely different way, and says his team is unique in studying how to use it as a targeted cancer therapy, part of the reason they just received a $1 million grant from the National Institute of Health to continue their research.

Forbes says he didn’t start off by trying to use salmonella as a piece of the cure for cancer, but he looked at the problem from a very practical, engineering standpoint of how to get a cancer treatment inside tumors, and saw salmonella as that way in.

Forbes hopes that if everything goes well with the next stages of research there could be human trials of a salmonella-based treatment in five years. “I do think it’s the future, but there’s not going to be a blockbuster cure. The cure is going to come in pieces; it’s going to come slowly,” Forbes said. “We’re all just trying to control it, to find better ways of controlling it. That’s how we’ll come to the cure; by making lots of pieces, and I see this as a very important, but just one piece of the puzzle.” Ben Williams can be reached at [email protected].