Ain Shams-Egypt 2016 IGEM Team
Hepatocellular Carcinoma And circular DNA
Project Description
Liver cancer in adult men is the fifth most frequently diagnosed cancer worldwide, and is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the world. In adult women, it is the seventh most commonly diagnosed cancer and the sixth leading cause of cancer death.
The burden has been increasing in Egypt with a doubling in incidence rates in the last 10 years, Egypt has a one of the highest incidence of in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in the world
Treatment options for HCC are limited and often inefficient. Anti-cancer therapy faces major challenges, particularly in terms of specificity of treatment. The ideal therapy would eradicate tumor cells selectively with minimum side effects on normal tissue
So as a team that believes in synthetic biology we searched how could we help our community regarding this problem & we found that it’s been shown that circular RNA (circ.RNA) is associated with human cancers, & some studies have been reported in HCC. Circular RNA will be delivered as it is a new area of research with around 130 circular RNA sequence detected in HCC only less than 10% of these has been investigated and characterized through previous studies.
Circular RNA is a type of RNA which, that forms a covalently closed continuous loop. This feature confers numerous properties to circular RNAs, many of which have only recently been identified. Circular RNAs have recently shown potential as gene regulators. Like many other alternative noncoding isoforms, the biological function of most circular RNAs are unclear, circular RNAs do not have 5' or 3' ends so they are resistant to exonuclease-mediated degradation and more stable than most linear RNAs in cells.
We are using mammalian cells to see the expression of the circular RNA in the deregulated micro RNA environment of the cancer cells in tissue cultures, prove their role and detect if they can serve as a biomarker in HCC, Detect the relation between its expression levels and rate of progression and the possibility of using it as a potential novel target for the treatment of HCC.
