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Passage 1: Treating cancer with radioactive bacteria Three wrongs make a right A surprising new way to kill tumours Apr 27th 2013|From the print edition Tweet PANCREATIC cancer is a dreadful disease. Even in rich countries, only about 4% of those diagnosed with it are still alive after five years. In America it is the third-most-common cause of cancer deaths among women, after lung and breast cancer; among men it is fourth, after lung, prostate and colorectal cancer. Dispiritingly, there has been little progress in treating it for more than a quarter of a century. The reason pancreatic cancer is so deadly is that it metastasises quickly. This spreading of secondary tumours around the body damages other organs and has proved impossible to stop. But a group of researchers led by Claudia Gravekamp of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, have an intriguing idea for changing that. As they describe in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they plan to do it by infecting people with radioactive bacteria. Dr Gravekamp came up with the idea following her discovery that weakened bacteria (specifically, a modified form of Listeria monocytogenes) she was using for other purposes in tumour-afflicted mice, and which were cleared from most of the animal’s body by its immune system over the course of a few days, remained in the tumours. This was thanks to the ability cancer cells evolve to suppress the immune system’s activities within their purview. Without that talent, cancers themselves would find they were under fatal assault from the immune system. Dr Gravekamp and her colleagues therefore thought that their bacteria might be used to deliver anti-cancer agents specifically to tumours. At first, they considered using drugs. But on the advice of Ekaterina Dadachova, a radiologist and one of the paper’s authors, they eventually plumped for attaching a radioactive isotope of rhenium to their bugs. Radioactive rhenium is commonly used in c