Cure to Cancer--Coming Soon from a Group of 18-Year-Olds?

It had been a while since I was able to actually put in a decent amount of time and effort into a presentation, so I went “ham” on this last one. I also was pretty bad at using Google Slide before we made this presentation, so I went extra ham on the presentation so I could learn how to use Google Slides well. After spending 2 hours drawing my own pictures on the PowerPoint and making sure every picture looked just the way I wanted and everything was formatted well, I felt like I had picked up some nice PowerPoint making skills—score! Also, I felt the actual presentation went well for me. I didn’t stutter too much, and I made sure to project my voice loud and clear.

The day after when we had to pick our final project, I felt like I had to pick which child I loved most. This actually wasn’t hard because we all know parents secretly love one child more than the others (kidding). I wasn’t too sad to see the artificial wound sealing project go—it didn’t seem like it would be that successful anyway, and the competition was too tough. I was genuinely sad to have to kick my own project, the biological sunscreen, off the list. While I think it was actually very novel and something that was genuinely doable that would have a large impact on a lot of people, there were just too many bioethical issues that would come into play. No one would be willing to modify his own genome, even if it meant protection from skin cancer. On the one hand, I was very happy to see that we’re working on cancer because it’s so broad and we could help so many people if we were to design a successful system for detecting cancer, but I’m also perturbed at how slim our chances of success seem. Labs all over the world are working on things like cancer detection methods, and there’s no way a few 18 year olds would be able to do it better than them. The competition is fierce, so if we want to develop a significant project, we would either need a stroke of genius to find a unique solution, or we would need to target a very specific problem that few labs are working on.

This is important to me because something I decided when we started the project was that I wanted to make system that could genuinely help people, and I’m afraid that might be difficult to accomplish in the area we’re currently trying to develop a system for.

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.

Goldilocks and the Three Ideas

Between iGEM and 20.020, I am beginning to feel a little like Goldilocks.  I am also feeling that a love of reading is a necessity. To put it more accurately, a love of skimming. Over the past few weeks, I have read what feels like countless papers. Coming up with ideas for a synthetic biology project sounds like it relies on creativity and knowledge of biology.  Although both those aspects are necessary, so are Google and PubMed and Google Scholar and many other databases full of scientific papers as we need to have a better understanding of what genes have been sequenced and what types of proteins and cell actions can help us accomplish our project's goal. Although I have just started this process for 20.020, iGEM has at least partially prepared me for the search for papers pertaining to our cancer detection project that are to come. Bring on the abstracts, fancy graphs, and really long names of proteins that I cannot pronounce! (Speaking of things I cannot pronounce, we has our presentations on Wednesday and, despite practicing, I still messed up pronouncing the names of a few proteins. That really frustrated me because I really did not want to let down the people on our team.)
Now all these papers are what make me feel like Goldilocks.  When creating a synthetic biology project, you have to find the project that is just right. If there has been a lot of research done on the topic, other labs are probably working on the project. If there has not been enough research done, that might be because the project is not feasible, profitable, or there is just not enough known about the causes or treatment of the issue for a synthetic biology approach to be taken yet. (In iGEM, all four of our groups have had panic moments when reading papers that began to reveal both ends of the spectrum.)  When we decided on our three ideas, we dealt with this issue.  The biological sunscreen was really cool, but it might not work because people would be hesitant to use viruses to change there cells.  Rapid wound sealing would be a really interesting project, but we are not really sure how we could put something to clot blood in the blood without causing clots and there had not really been enough research done yet about the techniques we were investigating.  Luckily, the cancer detection and treatment idea was novel and exciting.  Regardless, we are still working on modifying the idea as we discover what is actually possible (like do we really know exactly how to tell which cells are cancer cells) and what may have already been done (like tagging them with something like GFP).  Regardless, I think playing the role of Goldilocks and reading all these papers is worth it as we come closer to developing a focused project.

A Turtle with a Strawberry

      Wow, time really seems to be flying by.  It seems like we've just barely started the semester and yet we're already through our three ideas presentation and on our way to specifying our final system.  Among my team's 3 ideas - early cancer detection, biological UV protection and rapid wound sealing - we decided to move forward with the early cancer detection system.  I felt pretty good about each of the ideas but I think we made a good decision in the end.  Cancer is definitely a "hot" subject area plus, I might be able to use some of the immunology-related research I've been doing for my iGEM project to help with the sensing/localization side of things.  This weekend will likely see a lot more research for each of us and I'm excited to see what we come up with; especially because we can be a little more optimistic  as far as functionality goes since we won't actually be building the final system.
      I'm still really enjoying the class.  Everyone - Natalie, 20.385 mentors, other 20.020 students - have been great to work with and it's cool to see how people approach these kinds of problems that we're setting out to solve.
      On a slightly less academic note, I would like to give a huge shout out to Natalie for making presentation day a little less intimidating by getting us all Chipotle.

3 Ideas Later...

Well we have finally made it through the "Three Ideas Presentation", and as of yesterday, have finally narrowed down our many ideas to one topic.  The presentation itself allowed for myself, as well as the rest of my team, to further explore particular areas of synthetic biology in hopes to find a project area to explore.

Many ideas were tossed around, but eventually we settled on a cancer detection method, more efficient wound sealant, and a biological sunscreen.  The eventual single idea we settle on had to do with the search for innovative cancer detection methods, to better detect cancerous cells at an earlier stage in development.  Although all ideas posed plausible areas of expansion, we decided that the project pertaining to cancer research had the widest range of possibilities available.

In the next few weeks we will see where our initial ideas will take us.  In addition to this, we must consider all ethical, societal, and environmental concerns which will inevitably arise as a result.  The coming weeks will be very enlightening to say the least, and will more than likely create complex thinking among our group en route to proposing the best final presentation we can.  I'm sure looking forward to it!

From Proposals to Presentations

The past two weeks haven't felt the same in terms of the activities and procedures we went through, but I suppose that makes sense; we've been intently proposing and researching ideas, culminating in the 3 ideas presentations this past Wednesday. This open agenda of proposals to research to presentations felt quite different, seeing how we were now entirely responsible for the direction of our time and energy, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I suppose this is the kind of thing grad students do, albeit with more experience in their field and insight into how to solve the world's problems... This is the thing innovators do, right? They surely don't come up with these things overnight... it's much too difficult!
I think I enjoy presenting a lot, but I'd much rather have material rehearsed and ready to go rather than talking from a tablet; I just wish I had more time to invest in the preparation of the presentation.

Team Salty Microbial Helix is Forced to Change Names

This was a fun week in 20.020! I had a good time coming up with our three ideas and I’m excited to see where our project (plastic decomposition) goes next. We also need a new team name now that our project has nothing to do with salt, microbes, or helices... suggestions?

I learned to be concerned about the environment from my mom, an environmental engineer, so I'm glad we picked a topic that will help the planet. I was always the one turning off all the lights in our house and making sure to recycle and compost as much as we possibly could. Although a complete solution to the plastic problem is probably a pipe dream at this point, it is so cool to imagine that I could design something with such a big impact on the world… sigh.

Scientists have developed thousands of different kinds of plastics, so figuring out how to take them into account is the first puzzle that I’m trying to wrap my head around. Right now we are envisioning an immune-system-like approach that can respond to different types of plastic the system encounters, similarly to how the body’s immune system can ward off foreign antigens. This is really cool to think about even if it is pretty crazy. I think we’re going to have a hard time making it work for every kind of plastic on the planet, so we have to prioritize. Should we focus on the most harmful plastics? The most numerous ones? The ones that can’t be recycled? All things to think about. If building a plastic decomposition system that can attack multiple variants of plastic proves too challenging, our fallback plan is to focus on Styrofoam. It’s a big problem and I think it’ll have to be narrowed down at least a little bit before we can really tackle it, but I’m excited to start designing!