A bacterial injection system for protein delivery, base editing for CD3δ SCID and more

A team led by serial entrepreneur and Broad Institute professor Feng Zhang presented in Nature a strategy to deliver protein payloads into mammalian cells by exploiting the molecular machinery endosymbiotic bacteria use to inject proteins into hosts.

In silico structure-guided engineering of the Photorhabdus asymbiotica virulence cassette (PVC) tail fibre yielded a system capable of targeting human and mouse cells with almost 100% efficiency, and loading and delivering a range of payloads including Cas9, base editors and toxins into human cells. ...