Team:Duesseldorf

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Heinrich-Heine University Universitätsstraße 1 40225 Düsseldorf Design by Marvin van Aalst

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• Hardware
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• Team
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• Experiments

Imagine you turn the switch and the cancer is gone…

Cancer is the second most common cause of death killing about 8.2 million people annually, which equals the total population of New York City. The global increase of cancer cases and the lack of highly specific therapies for various types of cancer states a clear message:
New approaches have to be found, which allow a level of precision in cancer treatment that has been long-awaited.

Our approach aims at achieving high spatiotemporal control of apoptosis in tumor cells by applying an optogenetic double-killswitch. This system combines clean removal of cancer cells through apoptosis with the accuracy of light-controlled optogenetics. We utilize two optogenetic proteins, to create the desperately needed holy grail of cancer therapy.
This is the goal of OPTOPTOSIS.

Our Achievements

Bronze

Register And Attend

• Our team was successfully registered and had the greatest summer ever

Attribution

• We created our own Wiki with clear attribution of each aspect of our project

Deliverables

• The judging form and safety form was completed with great care
• We are very excited to present our poster and project talk at the Giant Jamboree
• We attributed and acknowledged all of the work done for our project on our Wiki page
• We documented and created Part pages for our Parts and submitted the DNA samples of our new Parts to the Registry

Part/Contribution

We are proud of our new standard Biobrick Part and submitted BBa_K1936000 to the iGEM Registry

Silver

Collaboration

• We had great collaborations with other teams and are really happy about our common success

Validated Part / Validated Contribution

• We characterized BBa_K1936001
• This part was submitted to the iGEM registry and is experimentally validated

Human Practices

• Of course, we shared our project and knowledge with the public and talked about the ethical aspects. We had a lot of fun at our different human practice activities.

Gold

Integrated Human Practices

• Additionally to our Human Practice work we visited the BfArM (the german equivalent of the FDA) and telephoned with the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which is responsible for admission of genetherapeutics, to consult professional critics concerning future applications of our project

Proof of concept

• We are really happy that we are able to show a functional proof of concept of our project with one of our newly created BioBricks

Demonstrate your work

• We were able to show our functional proof of concept under real world conditions with experiments in human cancer cell culture

Special

Special Prices

We have done some really good work so we applied for these Special Prices:

• Best New Basic Part
• Best Integrated Human Practice
• Best Hardware Project
• Best Education and Public Engagement

Results and engineered constructs of OPTOPTOSIS

Our red switch operates how it was desired

• we could show that our apoptosis protein is expressed
• our testing cells are still alive

Our blue switch operates how it was desired

• we could show that our construct is expressed
• our construct binds to the outer mitochondrial membrane

The combination of our two constructs operates how it was desired.

• Only when we irradiate our cells with red and blue light the cells commit apoptosis