1. Validated Part / Validated Contribution: The proof of validated part is shown in the link: BBa_K2514000 , BBa_K2514001

2. Collaboration: We have collaborated with 5 teams from human practice and experiment. The details are in “Collaboration” page. [Link]  https://2017.igem.org/Team:Worldshaper-Wuhan/Collaborations

3. Human Practices: Thorough human practice has been completed. For details, see “Human Practice” page. [Link]   https://2017.igem.org/Team:Worldshaper-Wuhan/HP/Silver

Silver

Interview:

At the early stages, we had two interviews with professors. The first professor is a doctor at Zhongnan hospital, Wuhan. Professor Rui Xu is an expert in treating colorectal diseases. We obtained information about the effect of treatments in clinical uses. The interview covers from basic knowledge on diagnosis as well as syndromes of colorectal cancer to the doctor’s suggestions on preventing the cancer. The interview was later posted on our team’s wechat official account. The interview suggested the importance of diagnosing colorectal cancer at its early stage. Yet, for many patients that Xu had treated, It was too late to treat the tumor and the tumor had already.

Later we had another interview with Professor Zhou at Wuhan University, School of Basic Medical Science. The questions are more focused on experiments and technique development instead of clinical implementations like what we talked about in the previous one. Professor Zhou provided suggestions on the future direction of microRNA biomarker. She told us that microRNA biomarkers not only serve for the diagnosis of cancer, but also help people to improve the treatments; that is , the marker developed can function in both diagnosis and treatment. Our group was at first focusing on the role of microRNA in diagnosing colorectal cancer, however through the interview we realized that the technique can be always developed as a tool for treatments. We modified the methods, and had a second trial.

Visiting to biomedical testing center

At the end our first trial, we visited Kindstar Global, a biomedical testing center, to learn about  techniques relating to our projects. The sophisticated machines were fascinating. Moreover, through our visit to the testing center, we were able to get a clearer idea how the merits as well as limitations of the testing and prospect the future of microRNA biomarkers as a tool for testing.

Self-improvement:

At the beginning of our project, we interviewed Doctor Xu at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University. After the interview, we realize that it is essential to improve the current diagnosis and treatments on colorectal cancer. Biomarkers may be a way to improve the techniques.Later we interviewed Professor Zhou’s from Wuhan University. She suggested the using of microRNA as a biomarker and told us about its function as a target in cancer treatments. After reading reviews on microRNA and cancer, we decided to focus our project on the application of miRNA-21 as a biomarker.

After visiting the testing center, we then realized a few problem with our project on its clinical uses. The clinical uses with biomarkers have to consider the cost of the testing, and these also involve a lot of complicated and scrupulous procedures. In addition, dealing with human tissue sample means that other factors may be hard to eliminate. Having this concern, we thought of doing the trials with mice or tissues of patients with colorectal cancer. However, the ethical problems behind the methodology are hard to fix. We ended up with trials of testing the reaction of the sponge in samples with different miRNAconcentration. Yet, even though a more clinical trial was not completed, the visit provided us with a few inspirations on how to standardize the result when dealing with factors, and we used miRNA precursor to do the testing.