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

Interview

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. The interview suggested the importance of diagnosing colorectal cancer at its early stage. It was later posted on our team’s WeChat official account.

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. 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.

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.

Self-improvement

Without realizing the medical ethics protocols behind, we formerly planned to borrow real rejected patients’ tissues from the hospitals, which provide an ideal environment to measure the expression of mir-21 in colorectal cancer patients. However, after the interviews with Professor Zhou and Professor Rui Xu and a careful review of iGEM’s guidelines, we became aware of the challenging, time-assuming and ethical aspects of this plan in light of the complex procedures that we have to complete in order to borrow and perform experiments on human tissue. For this reason, we reformed our plans and instead created environments containing varied concentration of mir-21, which simulated the varying amount of the miRNA in different human bodies and enabled us to better test and observe the potential of mir-21 sponge to be used as cancer detectors in various environments. The interviews also shed lights on the long way to come if we want to use mir-21 sponge in further researches

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.

Public Education

In mid July, we visited a local science center and gave short speeches to people pertaining basic information on colorectal cancer, current treatments, and, of course, our approaches to tackle this challenge. In this experience, raising public awareness of colorectal cancer is attempted. At the same time, some team members also scattered and distributed hand fans to people, on which basic information on prevention of the cancer and recommendation of doing regular checks were printed.

Team Wechat Accout

We also kept the account on WeChat Subscription from the 2017 Worldshaper-Wuhan team. Every happening event and works done will be updated and news about iGEM, colorectal cancer or synthetic biology will be shared on the account. Since there are large amount of people in China who browse through WeChat every day, this account is our window to the public.

This is our QR code, crowdfunding, scan, and subscribe us on WeChat!