Team:XHD-Wuhan-B-China/Human Practices
Throughout year 2021, we have gained knowledge and ideas from many meaningful HP activities. These experiences guided our way to a better, safer and more practical design of our project. Moreover, these engagements shaped our young minds to be aware about bioethics for the first time, helped us to determine in which ways we can make our project good for the world. To be more specific, our HP activities have changed our project in following aspects:
1. After we participated in the debate conference held by HZAU-China, we learned that testing new technologies on human being is highly risky and controversial, which means starters like us should rigorously avoid any attempts. We decided to leave cancer therapy as a future perspective of our project.
2. After we interviewed Professor Ma from HZAU, we learned that bacterial population often display heterogeneity, which means controlling bacterial cell cycle will highly facilitate 3D genome research. This insight becomes a major implementation of our project.
3. A brief conversation with an expert in fermentation helped us excluded blue light induced tools because blue light is high-energetical and can cause stress to fermentation strains.
4. During meet-ups with team HZAU-China, we talked about biosafety. They told us that many iGEM teams including them add suicide function to their projects to prevent contamination of the environment. These methods include: Oxygen induced, temperature induced or chemical induced suicide. We found that our project suits the theme of safety perfectly because light is abundant in natural environment and we are using light to prevent cell division, leaves our engineered strains no offspring without lab control. Since green light is especially abundant in the spectrum of natural light, we finally decided to use CcaS-CcaR, a green light induced TCS, as our optical tool.
5. Because the concept of safety became so entrenched in our minds during our investigations and interviews, we determined to find a safer replacement of EB or Acridine Orange, which are two carcinogenic DNA dyes commonly used in Chinese laboratories. We successfully built a safer protocol for DNA electrophoresis using GelRed® with HZAU-China and it becomes the new standardized method of their lab. Please view https://2021.igem.org/Team:XHD-Wuhan-B-China/Safety for more details.
For starters, we attended to some activities along with other iGEM teams. We visited the WUHAN INSTITUTE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY and WUHAN BIOBANK together with XHD-Wuhan-A-China and HZAU-China. We also attended to a HP activity that HZAU-China hosted, which is a speech and debate about bioethics.
After we interviewed Professor Binguang Ma from HZAU, we learned that bacterial population often display heterogeneity, which means controlling bacterial cell cycle will highly facilitate 3D genome research. This insight becomes a major implementation of our project.
A brief conversation with an expert in fermentation helped us excluded blue light induced tools because blue light is high-energetical and can cause stress to fermentation strains.
We had a conversation with Dr. Junbo Hu, from Hubei Material and Child Health Hospital, about the future of optogenetics in cancer therapy.
Question: "At present, in the treatment of cancer, what are the methods we choose to use?"
Answer: "It is the first surgical resection, and then the chemotherapy and radiotherapy. There are also some biological treatments, such as some targeted therapies, targeted drug treatments and traditional Chinese medicine treatments. These are the main methods."
Question: "Then what is the principle of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, for example? Does it stop the division of cancer cells or kill these cells directly?"
Answer: "There are different principles for different drugs. For example, some chemotherapy drugs target the cell cycle, and after blocking a certain cell cycle, it will disappear. The same is true for radiotherapy. A large dose of radiation is applied, and it targets cancer cells."
Question: "That is, is there a technology like optogenetics can control or cure cancer?"
Answer: "It seems that I have rarely heard of it before. The current methods are basically large doses of radiation, surgical resection, immunotherapy and biological treatment, I have never heard of others. Of course, optogenetics is developing very fast now, but we are not very familiar with it."
Question: "Our project is mainly to use light to block the expression of a gene in a cell, and then to block cell division. Do you think our method of optically regulating cell division can be applied to cancer cells? "
Answer: "That should be possible, I think it should be possible. But the key is to identify which cell is tumor cell. You also have to figure out the type of this tumor, because different tumors have unique properties. Some of them are malignant and spread very fast, such as lung cancer. We need to use different methods for different tumors, right?"
Question: "Then in which way do you think we can adjust this system to achieve therapeutic effect? Adjusting the intensity of light, or the wavelength?"
Answer: "You have to explore for yourself. I think different intensities and different lighting times come up with different effects, and also different colors of light. Because some tumors are sensitive to light, and some tumors are not sensitive. We have found hundreds of tumors, such as lung cancer, breast cancer, gastric cancer, and bowel cancer. Some tumors are sensitive to light, and the idea of light treatment may be effective."
Question: "Do you think this kind of optical regulation will have some negative effects on other cells in the human body? For example, chemotherapy can be harmful, even if it kills cancer cells, it will also hurt normal cells"
Answer: "This problem is very important. This is how you can kill cancer cells without killing normal cells, in another word, kill cancer cells to the greatest extent and protect normal cells to the greatest extent. This is a question you have to consider. For cancers in different locations, you may need different light waves, all of which need to be determined by experiments."
Question: "Then I would like to ask, what is our current cutting-edge technology for cancer treatment?"
Answer: "The current research direction is immunotherapy and plasma therapy.”
Question: "Then do you have any suggestions or expectations for our project?"
Answer: "I think it is a very good attempt, but first you must make preparations. Take actions after reviewing a large number of literatures, for example, about which tumors are sensitive to your light wave? It is necessary to find out. Because there are too many kinds of tumors in humans, it is necessary to find the right kind of tumor, and then design your treatment. This design can definitely not be your own whimsical, it needs to base on previous researches. Be aware of the bioethics when you design your project, and propose innovative theories."
Question: "If we can achieve curative effects, do you think it has application prospects?"
Answer: "The prospects are definitely bright. If you really achieve curative effects, then the prospect can be very good. Of course, if you provide another means besides the current existing treatments, then you must also evaluate it. For example, what about its side effects? Some high-hypertension drugs can lower blood pressure, but they can also cause dry coughing and some other side effects. There is also a price issue. Don’t make it too expensive. If the price is too high and no one can afford it, this technology will not be applied."
