Paying homage to inspiration

The great thing about scientists – well, one of the many great things about scientists – is that, at heart, they are big kids. Not, you understand, that they run around screaming inconsolably, or that they lack full control of their bodily fluids – but rather they have always managed to maintain that fabulous sense of excitement and wonder.

The ability to ask ‘what if?’ and the continuation of that line of thought to discover the consequences of the question – that is the power of science. For example: “what if energy and mass are the same thing?” or “what if all living things have the same ancestor?”  Or, and this is an absolute humdinger of a question: “What if we injected these radioactive bacteria into this mouse?”

Now, here on the Science Lite desk we are big comic book fans, and there can be no way the scientist behind this brilliant question – Professor Ekaterina Dadachova – hasn’t read, at the very least, the entire back catalogue of the Spider-Man series. It seems to us to be the ultimate example of life imitating art. And it is all the more fantastic for that.

And what of Prof Dadachova’s aim – other than simply to live out the best graphic novel never written? She wants to recruit these deadly microscopic assassins to hunt out and destroy cancers. And not just any cancer, she wants to target one of the very deadliest. Fewer than one in 25 people who are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are alive five years later ­– a stat Dadachova thinks she can change. Her paper, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes when coated with radioactive antibodies and injected into mice with pancreatic cancer, can reduce metastases by a whopping 90%.

Now, we could go on to give a detailed explanation as to the potential mechanism of these radioactive heroes – but is that what someone with the obvious comic book affiliations as Prof Dadachova would want? Well, yes…probably. But it isn’t what she is to get, rather we are going to honour her in a manner more suitable…

Reference:Non-toxic radioactive Listeriaat is a highly effective therapy against metastatic pancreatic cancer