Difference between revisions of "Team:McMasterU"

Project Description

GI tract cancers are an enormous public health issue, and together are responsible for more deaths than any other form of cancer. One of the major difficulties with diagnosing and treating these cancers, especially when localized to the intestine, is access to the tumour - patients often do not exhibit obvious symptoms until the later stages, when treatment options are limited.

We looked into a few different ways of tackling this issue, from improving existing diagnostic methods to developing new avenues for treatment. One of the consistent themes that came up in our brainstorming process was the potential for us to use the host's cell-mediated immune response to fight cancer. Cancer immunotherapy is a rapidly growing field, and clinical trials for certain forms of leukemia are already underway.

Thus, this year, McMaster iGEM sought to augment the power of the host immune system to fight against GI tract cancers, using a specially engineered strain of commensal lactobacillus bacteria. When completed, our bacteria will be able to sense the presence of tumours in the gut, bind to specific receptors on tumour cells, and begin secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines in this tumour microenvironment. This will recruit T cells to the site of the tumour and elicit an anti-cancer response, effectively stopping the cancerous growth using the body's own toolkits. This summer, we aim to develop a proof-of-concept of our idea, and create a bacterial strain that can secrete IL-2 under tightly controlled, tumour-specific conditions

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This project was worked on by many undergraduate students in the McMasterU iGEM 2016 Team, listed here by sub-team and alphabetically: Wet Lab Project Design, DNA Constructs Design, and Benchwork: Chirayu Bhatt, Karanbir Brar, Tony Chen, Yosef Ellenbogen, Melodie (Na-yoon) Kim, Vivian Lau, Dhanyasari Maddiboina, Maxwell Ng, Yu Fei Xia Website, Graphics Design, and Public Relations: Tony Chen, Farhaan Kanji, Nicholas Lehman, Maxwell Ng, Candy Niu, Yu Fei Xia, Kaijie Zhang Computational and Software Lab: Ian Fare, Nicholas Lehman, Lauren Liu, Maxwell Ng, Christine Wang, Kaijie Zhang Human Practices: Mohammed Ahmed, Karanbir brar, Yosef Ellenbogen, Melodie (Na-yoon) Kim, Jinny lee, Clara Long, Hwa Young (Haley) Yun, Community Outreach: Mohammed Ahmed, Chirayu Bhatt, Tony Chen, Yosef Ellenbogen, Vivian Lau, Clara Long, Ramneet Mann, Maxwell Ng, Rui Sun, Hwa Young (Haley) Yun Administration and External Liaisons: Mohammed Ahmed, Beenish Ajmal, Karanbir Brar, Farhaan Kanji, Samaher Ramzan, Michael Xie We would like to thank all our sponsors and mentors for guiding us and giving us the platform to investigate our research questions and conduct our project. It took an extraordinary amount of collaboration and support and we could not have done it without you. Dr. Rosa da Silva, Ms. Alison Cowie, Mr. Alastair Tracey, and the McMaster University Biology Department, for their support, guidance, provision of reagents, and lab space. Dr. Michael Surette and the Farncombe Institute for providing us with lab space, L. brevis strain and reagents to work with. Dr. Dawn Bowdish and the McMaster Immunology Research Centre, for providing us with lab space and tissue culture reagents. Dr. Indranil Biswas from the University of Kansas for providing the pIB184-Km plasmid. Hamilton Health Sciences Integrated DNA Technologies McMaster Student Union USIF Faculty of Science Faculty of Health Sciences, BHSc Program Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences Biotechnology Program

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