Team:AFCM-Egypt/HP/Gold
GOLD Human Practice
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) represents a huge burden on the Egyptian community due to its high prevalence and its late detection which is largely attributed to the lack of specific and sensitive markers. This was the reason why we chose it as the villain in our story.
The interviews we conducted with various experts served only to strengthen our belief in the importance of the success of our project and the impact it might have on our society.
The CRISPR effect
It's true, last year's project didn't turn out as we hoped! And that was probably why most interviews revolved around what went wrong and how we could correct it, the results of our conversations were as follows:
- We will construct two synthetic circuit instead of one; the first is similar to last year's circuit but with modifications in our design and lab protocols to test the feasibility of the idea in the HCC cell culture. The second circuit will involve the use of CRISPR gene editing to knock in our chosen circular RNA into the genome, two issues regarding the second circuit were solved
through the help of one of our experts which were:
- Our main design depended on knock out of a mutated gene inside the HCC genome but our discussions made us consider that knocking in of our gene would result in better outcome.
- We decided to use a sgRNA to create double stranded breaks instead of using 2 gRNAs to induce single stranded breaks on both strands of the target genome. The loss of efficacy would be compensated by the use of homology- directed repair. This change is the result of our discussion with Dr Vincenzo Coppola from the cancer and genetics department at the University of Ohio.
