Researchers from Italy and the United States who worked with mouse and human cancer cells in laboratories said their work might help in developing a new drug in a class of cancer treatments called immunotherapies or therapeutic vaccines, which harness the body’s immune system to fight disease.

“We did experiments first in mice and then in cancer cells and immune cells from human patients, and found that the salmonella was doing exactly the same job,” Maria Rescigno of European Institute of Oncology in Milan, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview. “Now we are ready to go into (testing on) humans, but we are waiting for authorization.”

The scientists said they thought the salmonella bacteria, which they used in a safe form that did not cause illness itself, helped to flag up cancer cells to the body’s immune system, which was then able to find and kill them.

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