Dec 5, 2019
How Studying Bioluminescent Creatures Is Transforming Medical Science
Theodossiou had long been working on photodynamic therapy (PDT), a cancer treatment that uses bursts of laser light to attack tumors close to the skin’s surface. But PDT can’t be used to treat cancer hidden deeper in the body. So Theodossiou used the same molecules that create firefly light—a yellow-green glow—to develop bioluminescence-activated destruction of cancer (BLADe), a method that allows the light source to come from inside the cancer cells as opposed to an external laser.