APC, Our Little Friend

When we first sat down and discussed our project ideas, everything seemed like it would be a breeze. We were able to come up with tons of ideas and it seemed like we could solve them all right then and there. And I’m now coming to realize, just like the rest of my group, why cancer sucks.  Since a cancerous cell is essentially a regular cell that divides more than usual, it makes sense detecting the differences between healthy and cancerous cells would be very difficult—the task seemed insurmountable a few days ago. I found it hard to believe that a couple of college freshman were going to be able to produce anything that billions of dollars of research wasn’t able to produce. It seemed like every time we found a potential avenue for detection, we found article saying, “two-billion dollars went into discovering this detection method could never work.” It was pretty discouraging until we stumbled upon a nifty little protein we like to call APC. It seemed like in the sea of proteins in the cytoplasm, this one just might have been overlooked earlier in cancer research. While it’s possible there’s someone out there researching this protein right now, we were at least able to begin to exploit this. APC is the most commonly different protein in colon cancers, and it seems to have a lot of potential for success with this project. I’m looking forward to everything coming together just in time for the tech-spec review. One small matter that could be an issue is that our method relies on the viral delivery of mRNA. This could be a huge bioethical barrier because the FDA would likely not approve the viral infection of humans for the purpose of only checking if someone has cancer or not. If it were a cure to cancer, perhaps the FDA could reconsider. For this project, however, I’m sure it’s fine to ignore the bioethical side of things for now.