Curing Cancer and Other Daily 20.020 Happenings

The past two weeks have held lots of exciting developments in terms of our 20.020 projects. One of the most difficult things for me personally has been choosing between all of the incredible ideas that have come up during team brainstorming sessions. In the end, we decided to go the route of developing a cancer detection mechanism, but there were plenty of other ideas that would have also provided interesting opportunities for us to pursue.

That said, the cancer detection idea is one that I am especially enthusiastic about. I have been interested in cancer biology for a very long time, and it's exciting to finally be able to work with a team and think critically about a solution. Cancer is a disease that has very clear-cut knowledge surrounding it, but it is also enigmatic in many ways. As an example, scientists know how to kill cancer cells in vitro, and sometimes this translates well to patient applications, but cancerous growths are able to undergo angiogenesis and create their own 'microenvironment' of sorts that prevents many treatments from safely reaching them. This paradoxical nature of the disease is what makes cancer so deadly. You would also be hard-pressed to find someone who has not been affected-- directly or vis a vis a family member or friend-- by cancer. While our project is mainly theoretical, who knows where it could lead in the future? I know that I personally would love to partake in cancer research at some point, and research-based knowledge like what we're gaining through this project would be extremely helpful going in to something like that. 

Moving forward, it's important to go in with the understanding that this is a difficult issue. Researchers have been working on treating cancer for nearly a century now. It is a problem that has left many great minds in the dark. Granted, we are not trying to physically cure cancer, but from here on the project is no longer based on what looks interesting or fun to pursue. We need to get very critical and investigative about what makes this disease tick, and I am so excited to get started.