Team:KAIST-Korea/Project/Introduction
From 2010.igem.org
Why E.canD? Two fifths of mankind is suffering from cancer during full life-time, and one fourths dies because of this disease. The rate of people who get cancer increases with age. However, human cannot notice easily about getting cancer or not due to incubation period. Doing so is easier when cancer’s diagnosed at an early stage as treatment is often simpler and more likely to be effective. So finding cancer early is very important.
Half of people are killed by cancer within five years after a diagnosis from doctor, and cancer shortens 15~20 years of lifespan of patients. Another interesting research said that 40% of cancer patients experience severe mental distress; most of them are suffered by pusillanimity. It can make one's life tragedy, not only oneself, but also one's family. Another terrible cause why cancer is severe to us is medical expenses. If someone got a cancer, we will receive huge doctor's fee like hundreds of thousands dollar. It makes terribly huge burden for ordinary family. Unfortunately, someone is sometimes suffering to cancer without any treatment.
In the case for women, breast cancer is really severe cancer and the most frequent cancer that can find. The following graph shows that a quarter of women who got a cancer have a breast cancer.
Whole PathwayFlash
Antibodies for Detecting Cancer Cells Cancer cell has distinctive protein expression pattern. This expression pattern also varies on the cell line of cancer cell. For example CD15 and CD30 proteins are OVEREXPRESSED on Hodgkin’s disease, kind of lymphoma, and CEA is over-expressed on adenocarcinoma cell. These protein expression patterns also vary on the cell line of cancer. For example breast cancer cell has different protein expression pattern; over-expression of Estrogen receptor, Progesterone receptor and KI67 of MCF-7 cell line and over-expression of Human Epidermal Growth Factor receptor, KI67 of AU-56 or SK-BR-3 cell line. Therefore, it allows us to know not only the existence of cancer, but also the type of cell line to identify the protein expression pattern of biopsy sample. We selected Estrogen Receptor and HER2 for our project to make a diagnosis the breast cancer. The reason why we selected these proteins is that they are differently over-expressed. Comparing over-expression pattern of these proteins can diagnose existence of cancer and type of cancer.
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