Team:Worldshaper-Wuhan/HP/Gold Integrated
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See How The World Affects Our Experiment
In previous surveys, it would be very encouraging to find that if our project results can play a role in the early diagnosis of kidney cancer. Under the guidance of our instructors, for experimental design, we plan design several parts based on long non-coding RNA. At least, One of them is expected to be a biomarker in the early detection and diagnosis of kidney cancer.
In the process of experimental design, we also have some collaboration with the other iGEM teams. Of them, HZAU-China team leader’s suggestions really help us improve our experiments design. she proposed the possibility for us to try out multiple cell lines from different cancers to test out the specificity of our lncRNA.
(We are in HZAU-China’s lab)
Then, We feedback their suggestions with our instructor professor Zhou, and after discussion we decided to adopt their opinions.We selected three cancer cell lines for comparison and found that LncRNA IL7-AS we selected had significant results in all three cancer cell lines.
(We are discussing with Professor Zhou)
Thanks for HZAU-China team’s help, Our results shows that there were significant expression differences among 293T (the healthy cell), 769-P (the adenocarcinoma cell) and 786-O (the adenocarcinoma cell) cell lines. The expression in 769-P and 786-O were higher than that of 293T, showing speciality and universality of IL7-AS.
(Fig. Compared to HEK-293T, IL7-AS was highly expressed in 786-O and 769-P cells as shown by real-time PCR)
Other Activities
Before we started designing the experiment of our project, we visited several companies in Bio-Valley, including cancer diagnostics and testing companies, and pharmaceutical companies.
We as a team visited the biolake of the Optic Valley, which is the Wuhan bioindustry base and home of leading Chinese biopharmaceutical companies like Humanwell Healthcare, Healthgen Biotechnology, and Zoncare. Kindstar Global, a company located in biolake and focuses its business on medical examination, is the main stopping spot for our trip.
Kindstar Globalgene (Beijing) Technology, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “Kindstar Global”) is the first and biggest leading-edge medical esoteric testing service group in China. This company provide a series of clinical tests, including tumor disease tests, genetic diseases teasts, hematologic dematologic disease tests.
About tumor disease tests, there are several common tumor detection , such as lung cancer ,breast cancer, and Colorectal Cancer etc .cancer. However, we realized that there is a lack of resource on the diagnose of kidney cancer.
In order to identify our research direction and feasibility, we planned to seek professional advice in local authoritative hospital. Fortunately, we got Dr.Guo’s contact information with advisor’s assistance. Afterward, we made an appointment with Dr.Guo and prepared for our interview draft and some equipment for interviewing.
Dr. Guo told us that kidney cancer is not easy to detect, if detected in time, through surgical treatment, may not have bad impact on the life span of patients. However, as mentioned above, After visiting the biological company, we found that the technology that can diagnose kidney cancer does not exist. Moreover, Dr, Guo told us that the current treatment methods for kidney cancer are very limited, so many patients once found have this cancer already in the last stage , at this stage, The possibility of successful cure rates will be very low, These findings give a clearer direction to our experimental design. We assume that if our project can help advance the early diagnosis of kidney cancer or in the development of cancer drugs. That would be very encouraging.
See How We Affect The World
In order to better promote our future research. We prepared two questionnaires to investigate the public's understanding of kidney cancer and synthetic biology in the project we investigated. These Questionnaire results have conduct us to promote public awareness of kidney cancer and synthetic biology.
Our survey shows that most people are scared of cancer, 67% of them know cancer around them. About kidney cancer, there are 63% people have heard about it, we speculate that cancer is a systemic disease, so people will consider any organ is at risk of cancer, But only 9% know much about kidney cancer. What's more, 28% of them have never heard of it.
When it comes to questions related to our experimental design, for example, Do you know long non-coding RNA or synthetic biology? As we expected, few people know about them, three quarters of the population have ever heard of it . However, it is encouraging that majority people have confidence in modern medical, they believe that cancer will be cured one day by medical technology.
These Questionnaire results have conduct us to promote public awareness of kidney cancer and synthetic biology.