Researchers have harnessed a natural bacterial system to develop a new protein delivery approach that works in human cells and animals. The technology, described in Nature, can be programmed to deliver a variety of proteins, including ones for gene editing, to different cell types. The system could potentially be a safe and efficient way to deliver gene therapies and cancer therapies.

The team took advantage of a tiny syringe-like injection structure, produced by a bacterium, that naturally binds to insect cells and injects a protein payload into them. The researchers used the artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold to engineer these syringe structures to deliver a range of useful proteins to both human cells and cells in live mice.

“This is a really beautiful example of how protein engineering can alter the biological activity of a natural system,” said the study’s first author. “I think it substantiates protein engineering as a useful tool in bioengineering and the development of new therapeutic systems.”

“Delivery of therapeutic molecules is a major bottleneck for medicine, and we will need a deep bench of options to get these powerful new therapies into the right cells in the body,” added the senior author. “By learning from how nature transports proteins, we were able to develop a new platform that can help address this gap.”

Symbiotic bacteria use the roughly 100-nanometer-long syringe-like machines to inject proteins into host cells to help adjust the biology of their surroundings and enhance their survival. These machines, called extracellular contractile injection systems (eCISs), consist of a rigid tube inside a sheath that contracts, driving a spike on the end of the tube through the cell membrane. This forces protein cargo inside the tube to enter the cell.

On the outside of one end of the eCIS are tail fibers that recognize specific receptors on the cell surface and latch on. Previous research has shown that eCISs can naturally target insect and mouse cells, but the authors thought it might be possible to modify them to deliver proteins to human cells by reengineering the tail fibers to bind to different receptors.

Using AlphaFold, which predicts a protein’s structure from its amino acid sequence, the researchers redesigned tail fibers of an eCIS produced by Photorhabdus bacteria to bind to human cells. By reengineering another part of the complex, the scientists tricked the syringe into delivering a protein of their choosing, in some cases with remarkably high efficiency.

The team made eCISs that targeted cancer cells expressing the EGF receptor and showed that they killed almost 100 percent of the cells, but did not affect cells without the receptor. Though efficiency depends in part on the receptor the system is designed to target, the lead author says that the findings demonstrate the promise of the system with thoughtful engineering.

The researchers also used an eCIS to deliver proteins to the brain in live mice — where it didn’t provoke a detectable immune response, suggesting that eCISs could one day be used to safely deliver gene therapies to humans.

The author says the eCIS system is versatile, and the team has already used it to deliver a range of cargos including base editor proteins (which can make single-letter changes to DNA), proteins that are toxic to cancer cells, and Cas9, a large DNA-cutting enzyme used in many gene editing systems.

In the future, the author says researchers could engineer other components of the eCIS system to tune other properties, or to deliver other cargos such as DNA or RNA. He also wants to better understand the function of these systems in nature.

“We and others have shown that this type of system is incredibly diverse across the biosphere, but they are not very well characterized,” the author said. “And we believe this type of system plays really important roles in biology that are yet to be explored.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05870-7

http://sciencemission.com/site/index.php?page=news&type=view&id=publications%2Fprogrammable-protein&filter=22