Why 2018 Was the Year of Living Medicines

How Engineered Organisms are Being Programmed to Fight Disease

E. coli cells magnified 10,000x. Original image by Eric Erbe and Christopher Pooley, USDA.

Leeches, those blood-sucking, slimy animals that are too often the stuff of nightmares and B-movies (for a great B movie example, see Leeches!, a movie from 2003, with the actual plot line of: “Mutated leeches terrorize a college campus after feeding on blood tainted by steroids”), are…