I know it sounds weird, but scientists say they’ve tamed one of the world’s most deadly food poisons and turned it into a suicidal strain of microbes that can deliver life-saving drugs into the body.

Listeria monocytogenes bacterium

What prompted Colin Pouton and his colleagues in Melbourne, Australia, to consider using a poison to deliver medicines?

The scientists looked at what we all know: patients by far prefer pills and capsules to the pain and nuisance of injections.

But these pharmaceutical science whizzes knew that many medicines and vaccines couldn’t be given by mouth because they would be destroyed by stomach acid without being absorbed into the bloodstream.

So now enters listeria monocytogenes, the bacteria that brings us listeriosis. According to the Centers for Disease Control listeriosis seriously sickens an estimated 2,500 persons each year in the U.S. alone, 500 of whom die.

Of course, as with most food poisoning agents like salmonella and E.coli, for every case that’s reported or identified, there may be a dozen or more that are never tallied.

Nevertheless, it was the listeria bacteria that the scientists down under genetically engineered into live bacteria, which can survive the internal hazards and harsh conditions of the human digestive process and pass easily from the GI tract into the blood.

Prof. Colin Pouton

Instead of causing disease, the genetically engineered listeria monocytogenes can be loaded with medicine or vaccine and deliver that beneficial cargo by infecting cells. After entering cells, the bacteria burst and die, Pouton explains, leading to his use of “suicidal strain” to describe the microbes.

According to the current issue of ACS , testing on animals have confirmed that the work of Pouton and colleagues proves the new technique is a way to give patients medicine and vaccines in pills rather than injections. The findings suggest that the approach could potentially work in humans, the researchers say.