Improved Tumor Targeting of Salmonella VNP20009 via Ice-llama Antibody Guidance

There is a continual need to explore alternative approaches to treat cancer to improve patient outcome and reduce the dreadful side-effects of some of the therapies available. While specific bacteria have shown a natural propensity to target tumors in animal models and have been engineered for drug delivery, targeting in human trials was essentially ineffective. To date, while antibody based targeting has been employed to deliver radio- or chemo- active compounds to destroy the tumor, it has so far not been fully explored to deliver bacteria. Here, we propose to engineer bacteria to display antibodies on their cell surface that are specific for the tumor cell surface, thereby encouraging effective bacterial tumor targeting. We aim to first study the engineered bacteria in a model breast cancer cell line and then to demonstrate improved targeting and tumor destruction in a mouse model of human breast cancer.