The concept of using live bacteria as therapeutic agents has existed for well over a century and has led to the common use of Mycobacterium bovis BCG to treat bladder cancer. The attraction of this approach stems from the naturally evolved ability of pathogens to interact with animal systems and the observation that specific natural isolates show therapeutic benefits even without modification. The advent of genetic engineering rebooted interest in these strategies and has resulted in the development of live vaccines, immunostimulatory drugs, and cancer therapies with varied success. The limitations in this area have been the effectiveness of treatment, the robustness to animal and patient variability, and side effects. These limitations of traditional approaches make biological therapeutics an ideal testbed for the emerging field of synthetic biology, a reductionist approach to genetic engineering where complex dynamic systems are built ground-up from well-characterized cellular chasses and functional parts

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