The Devil's in the Details

      The last two weeks (aside from the much need interlude that was spring break) have largely been spent investigating at ever increasing levels of specificity the projects we have chosen.  It's very easy to see why curing cancer is the subject of such a large amount of research; there are seemingly infinite possible mutations that can lead to the disease making it difficult (if not impossible, at least for the moment) for any one detection or treatment method to work on all possible cancerous phenotypes.  As such we've decided to narrow our primary goal to detecting gastrointestinal (GI) cancers, as that is an area of the body that is fairly accessible.  You can ingest a pill, put something in a piece of food or just straight up use a scope to get things into the GI tract; much easier than something like the brain which has that messy blood-brain barrier to contend with.
      Our decision to narrow the scope of our project has made our job of detection (at least a little) easier.  Since GI cancers are in the same areas and involve many of the same kinds of cells, they tend to have more in common than any two generic cancer cells from other forms of cancer, making it easier to avoid false positives on our test.  The job of finding a reliable marker was still in no way trivial.  We investigated a variety of surface proteins that are common on cancer cells but ruled them out because most were also upregulated in several other non-cancerous diseases.  In the end we decided to focus in measuring an activity within the cells that we are screening for cancer.  According to research we found, one of the most common mutations in GI cancers is loss of function in the APC gene.  We'll go into more detail about how we plan to check for that mutation in our tech spec review this week but I'm pretty excited about what we've come up with thus far.  Overall, I think we have a pretty solid system planned for checking for APC mutation and while I hope we can find a more generalized solution (perhaps something involving the common loss of DNA repair mechanisms), things are looking pretty good.