Tetsuhiro Harimoto

Microbes aren’t too smart—they don’t have brains or even nervous systems. But they’re good at what they do. Research suggests that about 30 trillion bacteria colonize a typical human body, living on the skin and in the gut. They even live inside tumors.  

But what if bacteria could be made smarter? Tetsuhiro Harimoto, 32, a postdoc who goes by “Tetsu,” has spent the last few years trying to turn bacteria into “intelligent living medicines” that might be taught to automatically seek out and attack cancer.

“My vision is to create a new class of drug delivery technology made of engineered living microbes that can efficiently home to tumors, autonomously sense the environment, and produce drugs in a sustainable and controllable manner,” he says.

Using the tools of synthetic biology while getting his PhD at Columbia, he’s already demonstrated that it might be possible. To some bacteria, he added genes that let them detect when they’re inside a malignancy (low oxygen levels are common in tumors). To others, he gave the ability to pump out cancer-killing drugs.

His next project will be to bring these techniques together, creating bacteria that can sense cancer cells and, he hopes, kill them on the spot.