Team:NTHU Formosa

Welcome to iGEM 2018!

Your team has been approved and you are ready to start the iGEM season!

Autonomous cell reporter system for non-invasive real-time blood diagnosis People around the world are growing awareness to their health condition. To monitor the health condition, a wide range of biomarkers-- special substances in the bloodstream representing the physiological and pathological states-- has been used in clinical diagnoses1. Blood test is one of the most common way for detecting biomarkers but it suffers from several inevitable drawbacks such as invasiveness, time-consuming procedure, demand for medical staff service, non real-time tracking and so on. These disadvantages may discourage people from the periodic medical checkup. Indeed, according to a survey (of 1862 samples) pulled by our team, nearly half of the participants took blood test less than once a five-year frequency (Fig. 1), which is impractical for early detection and early treatment of diseases. In terms of non-invasive real-time health monitoring, great varieties of wearable devices and smartwatches, working as personal daily fitness trackers, have been developed. The global market of wearable medical devices is estimated to reach $35 billion USD soon. However, most of the current devices are only capable of measuring heart rate, steps taken, calories, quality of sleep and a few other personal metrics. These limited diagnosis information provided by current devices cannot precisely represent the physiological states relating to many diseases. To address this long-standing worldwide issue, we aim to develop a new tool, a non-invasive or minimally-invasive real-time tracking system for the level of specific biomarkers in bloodstream.