An Autonomous and Adaptive Bacteria-based Drug Delivery System

Abstract

Traditional drug delivery systems are often inefficient and imprecise as they mainly rely on diffusion processes. For example, the blood circulation system is often used to transport and deliver drugs throughout the body; due to the randomness involved in molecular diffusion, this approach may cause inefficient delivery of drugs. To deal with this problem, we propose an autonomous and adaptive bacteria-based drug delivery system that integrates bacterial chemotaxis and quorum sensing to deliver drugs efficiently and precisely. More specifically, we design a synthetic AND gate that enables bacteria to detect the molecules produced by a particular type of tumor and release the appropriate drugs in a coordinated manner; the system can also dynamically adjust the amount of drugs released based on tumor size and activity. We envision that such a system can be used for cell-based therapeutics while preventing drug overuse and multidrug resistance.