Description

Experiment

Result

Model1

Model2

Model3

Esophagus meets Tsinghua-A

The Situation

Esophageal cancer (squamous cell carcinoma) is occurred in esophageal epithelial tissue malignant tumor, is one of the diseases having serious threat to people's health and life. The early symptoms of Esophageal Cancer is hidden and subtle so that there is rare clinical early esophageal cancer patients. While the patients who found that the symptoms, is late more, and lose the chance of early treatment.

Morbidity

Esophageal cancer (ICD - 10: C15) is a common cancer in China. According to the international agency for research on cancer in 2008, the world cancer incidence and death report (Globocan 2008) estimated that 481600 cases of esophageal cancer in the world, China's 259200 cases, accounting for 53.82% of the world, global 406500 cases died during this period, the China of 211100 cases (51.92%).

In China, around the Taihang mountain area of Henan, Hebei and Shanxi provinces border region, especially in Linzhou, Anyang, and Huixian, esophageal cancer incidence and mortality rates are the highest in the world, high and low rates area arranged in concentric circles, only hundreds kilometers apart. This phenomenon is prompt environmental factors play an important role in esophageal cancer occurs. The lack of nutrient elements [vitamins such as riboflavin, etc.) and trace elements (such as zinc, etc.)] , nitrite, virus (HPV) and some toxins (such as mycotoxin) is considered to be important risk factors of the disease.

Diagnosis and Treatment

Preventive Tips

1. Eat less hot or irritant food, such as hot pot, pepper, etc. Long-term consumption of such food will result in esophageal mucosa injury. If the stimulation last for some time, it may cause inflammation of the esophagus and esophageal cancer.

2. You must be chewed before swallowing the food and eat slowly so that food will be better digested, the poisonous substance will be neutralized and bacteria will be killed.

3. Maintain comprehensive nutrition intake, to prevent malnutrition. Because if we often avoid certain food, our human nutrition won’t reach the standard. Esophageal cancer maybe occur after the lack of protein and vitamin A, B.

4. Prevent carcinogens. While carcinogenic substances mainly nitrite, a lot of food contain this kind of material, such as vegetables or meat after curing, leftovers that remain overnight and salt will generate into nitrite at high temperature. In addition, such as mildew grain, corn, peanuts contain large amounts of yellow aspergillus. Eating many moldy food will be very easy to cause the esophageal cancer.

In addition to developing healthy eating habits, we should be patient with poor swallowing or foreign body sensation and do gastroscopy as early as possible in order to find early esophageal cancer or precancerous lesions. Remember that early esophageal cancer can be cured completely.

Our HP story

What has been most interesting and enjoyable for us about Human Practices?

We think Human Practice itself is an interesting thing for us which we enjoy so much. We know a lot about the society. Throughout this summer, we visit the best cancer hospital in China----The National Cancer Center and communicate with the experts who have a deep understandings of Esophagus Cancer in order to ensure that our project is addressing a genuine need as defined by those who know best.

We learn how doctors work, how they take care of patients, how they do experiments and overcome difficulties. Doctors in China have really hard work to do every day. We have a better understanding of the disease which we deal with. Over 90% esophagus cancer happens in China and the survival rate is lower than 20%. We also visit labs and give questionnaires to the public. What we do makes us acquire the current situation of esophagus cancer and the life of doctors in China. These things really attracts us.

What challenges has your team faced in developing and running our Human Practices activities?

At the beginning, the challenge for us is how we can visit the hospital. We don’t know any doctors and we are not sure whether the doctors want to communicate with us. So we contact with some medical students in The National Cancer Center at first. Thankfully, they’d like to help us and make an appointment with the doctors.

During our visiting, it comes the biggest difficulty------the way we communicate to the patient. We want to know how they feel and we want to comfort them, but none of us know how to start to talk. We are afraid that we might not be polite to them or disturb them. At first we were a bit embarrassed when facing them. However, they were friendly and we had a good conversation.

What support or resources can iGEM offer to help us improve our Human Practice work?

We hope that the iGEM foundation can propagandize more about iGEM competition and make more people know about it. It’ll help us easier to get access to the resources. Meanwhile, we hope that iGEM can help us propagandize our ideas. We’ll be really thankful!

Synthetic Biology
Meets
Clinical Medicine

What kinds of people are more vulnerable to esophageal cancer?

Nearly 90% of esophageal cancer patient are found in china. There’s also a featured geographical distribution of this disease. Most cases aggregate in area along the Taihang mountain, which covers provinces like Heibei, Heinan. There’re also some villages in Xinjiang and Sichuan where esophageal cancer is frequent. Through clinical observation, many esophageal cancer patients often drink really hot water or soup, and eat stimulating food. Drinking alcohol and smoking also contribute to high risk of esophageal cancer.

What are the current therapeutic tools of esophageal cancer?

Like most cancer, treatment of esophageal cancer mainly involves 3 methods, which are surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. According to the patients’ situation, doctor will take one or a combination of these 3 methods. And the curative effect also varies with different patient.

How about chances that esophageal cancer can be completely cured?

That depends. We usually divide cancer into 4 stages according to the extent of cancer cell proliferation. In Stage I, during which cancer cells haven’t transferred, the 5-year survival rate can reach 70%. When it comes to Stage II, this number dramatically drops under 50%. And for Stage III and IV, it is 20% and 10% respectively.

Can esophageal cancer be easily diagnosed in early stage?

Currently there are two major approaches to test esophageal cancer. First one is CT (computed tomography), which can show the thicken area in the esophageal wall. Another one is doing gastroscope, which allows doctor to directly see the abnormity in esophageal and take sample for further examination. Though these two approaches have high accuracy, each of them has their own drawbacks. CT may bring radiation hazard. Doing gastroscope is a rather painful process, and it’s hard and expensive to book a painless gastroscopy. These drawbacks deter people from these checks when they don’t have any symptom. However, it’s usually too late when one can feel the lesion.

According to your observation during work, which stage does most patients in when they realize the disease?

It varies with individual, but according to my observation, most patients are sent here in Stage III or IV. Because the standard test approaches, as I’ve said before, are expensive, time-consuming and painful, most people won’t do these tests unless they feel really uncomfortable.

Are there any biomarkers for esophageal cancer that are currently in clinical application?

No. There are currently many researches focus on miRNA working as potential biomarkers for esophageal cancer. But none of them is fully demonstrated enough to be used clinically. The most popular research method is screening large number of miRNAs, measuring their expression level in subjects, and find possible relations. However, limited by time and expense, the sample capacity of these researches is not able to be large enough to represent the entirety. Thus the results of these researches have limitation. Even so, as statistics of each research accumulating, and human technology developing, biomarkers are a promising trend of disease detection.

What do you think about our project?

It’s a really interesting one. Your test paper can work as a preliminary screening of esophageal cancer high risk people, because it’s convenient and noninvasive. To do this, you need to ensure the sensitivity, not specificity, of the test paper. Though at present you may not be able to work out a test paper that can be used in clinically, it’s a very good idea, or concept.

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