The new platform combines the bacteria’s tendency to find and attack tumors with the virus’s natural preference for infecting and killing cancerous cells.

Tal Danino, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, led the team’s effort to create the system, which is called CAPPSID (short for Coordinated Activity of Prokaryote and Picornavirus for Safe Intracellular Delivery). Charles M. Rice, an expert in virology at The Rockefeller University, collaborated with the Columbia team.

“We aimed to enhance bacterial cancer therapy by enabling the bacteria to deliver and activate a therapeutic virus directly inside tumor cells, while engineering safeguards to limit viral spread outside the tumor,” says co-lead author Jonathan Pabón, an MD/Ph.D. candidate at Columbia.