Question: What is the most Lethal Cell you have worked with?

Tom Snelling answered on 14 Nov 2019:

The cells I use are not that dangerous. I sometimes use cancerous cells but it is very unlikely these would survive inside me if they somehow entered my body. The most dangerous work is actually using a virus to turn a healthy immune cell into a cancerous immune cell. We do this because the number of immune cells we can get from a mouse is very low — if we did not make them cancerous we would need to use a lot more mice for our experiments.

To make the cell cancerous we use a virus which is known to cause cancer in humans – it is called the SP40 virus. It would only cause problems if it somehow entered my blood through a wound or needle, which be very unlikely.