When anyone mentions salmonella most people envision the misery of food poisoning. Every year the media publishes more stories about people who were sickened by salmonella found in bad eggs or under cooked chicken. But through the work of a group of research scientists there may soon come a time when salmonella loses some of its bad reputation and becomes a force for good as well as a source of misery.

Thanks to the work of Sara Bartels and Siegfried Weiss of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany scientists may be able to introduce the bacteria into solid tumors, making them far easier to destroy than previously possible.

During the course of their experiments the two German researchers were able to demonstrate exactly how Salmonella can migrate into these tumors. A substance that serves as a “messenger” opens a doorway that makes cancer cells permeable. This allows the bacteria to begin destroying the tumor while blood floods the cancerous tissue, causing it to “die”.

Weiss and Bartels named this messenger substance after its basic function in the body: tumor necrosis factor or TNF as their report refers to it. Immune cells throughout the body naturally produce TNF as a defense mechanism when salmonella bacteria enter the body, leading to the increased permeability of the blood vessels, an action that also happens within a tumor.

In future work the scientists are hoping that they will be able to find a mechanism that can modify salmonella to be used effectively in cancer tumor therapy. The best scenario would be to engineer a method by which the bacteria could be forced to migrate into specific tumors and destroy them.

There is such great hope that this can be achieved because of the hardy “lifestyle” of the salmonella bacteria. It can live almost anywhere in the body even in tissues with a limited blood supply and therefore oxygen content. These are the very areas where tumors are so very hard to treat with current methods. Both radiation and chemotherapy need the presence of a good amount of oxygen to be effective in fighting cancer.

The concept of using bacteria to destroy cancer cells is not a new one but it has not been used as of yet because of the very real risk of the patient dying from infection. But the new research may take that risk out of the equation. “We have obtained an important indication of how bacteria migrate into tumors. We can now try to manipulate these bacteria to use them in cancer therapy without causing deadly infections,” said Bartels.

Her colleague Siegfried Weiss is equally optimistic about the potential of their research but issued a cautionary statement our experiments are currently limited to absolutely basic research and experiments with laboratory mice,” he stated “it may take years before this method is usable for human patients.”