Description
Cancer has become one of the most deathful diseases over decades. Certain type of cancers, such as lung cancer and brain cancer (glioma), has extremely high mortality against its treatments. We interviewed clinic doctors and began to understand the situation. Although there are treatments for each type of cancers in hospital nowadays, many of them are not that efficient, especially for those deathful cancers that mentioned previously. Traditional treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy are harmful for both good and bad cells. It does too much damage to patients’ bodies, which needs to be replaced by better medical methods. Nonetheless, some new treatments like targeting therapy are quickly developing. Antibody drugs, which are also playing a more than more important role in this field, specially attracted our attention.
After a face-to-face meeting with experts in antibody research and production, we know that antibody is the most critical or the major part of antibody drugs. The antibody, known as immunoglobulin, is a large, Y-shaped protein that is used by the immune system to neutralize pathogens such as bacteria and viruses in vertebrate. They are secreted mostly by differentiated B cells called plasma cells. And we also told that besides the traditional hybridoma technique, a new method to get the antibody - recombinant antibodies technology is well developing, which favorites the antibody drug research. We also noticed that this new technology still lacks a cheap and efficient antibody screening method, therefore, we narrowed our research objective on this part, and gradually, we clarified our research direction.
It is well know that a good antibody comes from a good B cell, in consequence, we decided to develop a smart E.coli system by synthetic biology method for B cells capture utilizing the high affinity interaction between antigen and antibody. The system can be used to screen and capture the desired B cells that secret the corresponding antibodies. And these captured B cells can be fused or gene cloned for antibody producing. Moreover, this system can also be applied to many aspects with enormous value, such as vaccine producing and immune T-cells or tumor cells separations.
