Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/projects

Hello everyone, we're igemers from team SJTU-BioX-Shanghai and we're glad to present our projects to you! At the moment we have 2 projects developing in our lab, and both of them are progressing smoothly.

Project descriptions:

1. Light-controlled tumor therapy

We have designed our project as a 'light-controlled tumor therapy', which might prove an innovative treatment for tumor with light as its 'switch'. Viral vectors deliver our eukaryotic genetic circuit into tumor cells. Light-controlled cation channels are expressed and then activated by exposure to light of a specific wavelength, and the influx of cations 'switches on' a downstream effector device, which brings about necrosis and apoptosis exclusively within tumor cells. Normal cells are protected by a dual lock — tumor-specific promoter of the whole circuit and inhibitor protein of effector which avails when cells are not exposed to specific light.

2. An synthetic biological approach to osteoarthritis(OA)

We try to construct a kind of genetically engineered bacteria which can detect the osteoarthritis (OA) and then repair the articular cartilage suffered from OA. Frequent heavy burden on cartilage will cause damage. If the damage are left untreated, the damaged joint will progress to osteoarthritic cartilage, i.e. cartilage suffered from OA. In OA, chondrocytes in resting state will abnormally differentiate. Meanwhile, the matrix of joint is degrading. In order to treat OA, we try to reverse the differentiation of chondrocytes and supplement the matrix. Therefore, we decide to construct genetically engineered bacteria that have these two abilities and can be used as a kind of therapy to cure OA.