A therapeutic system needs to be characterized by two crucial features; safety and effectiveness. By giving both features extreme attention, we managed to develop a novel modus operandi, where both the delivery system efficiently targets only cancer cells and the therapeutic RNAi-based logic circuit only affects the specific cancer cell types.
When it comes to colorectal cancer, what better delivery system can one use than the bacteria, that already naturally dwell in the colon? E.coli transformed with a low-copy plasmid containing the part BBa_K1850011 adhere only to colorectal cancer cells and not onto healthy cells, according to iGEM Harvard 2015.
But, in order to improve the system Harvard worked on, we recreated it without the need to control the entire fim operon expression or burden the bacteria with an extra 8kb-plasmid. Finally, going one step further again, we tested the delivery system in a co-culture of bacteria and colorectal cancer cells and succeeded in optimizing the conditions needed for the system to work.
In order to test our colorectal
