Team:BGU Israel
Welcome to iGEM 2015!
Hello! We are Ben-Gurion university iGEM team
We are developing applications for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
Despite the huge investment in research and the development of a variety of treatment methods, cancer is still a major cause of death in the world. Today, both surgical and pharmacological treatments against most types of cancer are not accurate enough to identify and treat the disease on a cellular level. On the other hand, novel biological treatments being developed were only found effective for a relatively small number of patients.
In cancer, many cellular and molecular processes take place, enabling the tumor to develop and spread in the body. We believe that it is possible to take advantage of the many typical biological mechanisms of cancer cells, by developing a synthetic biology-based system for identifying and treating cancer on a cellular level.
Together as a team, we developed a modular system which identifies numerous genetic changes in cancer cells and responds by activating a synthetic machine that executes a cell suicide program or enables color-based "tagging" of the cells for tumor detection, ensuring complete surgical removal.
The novelty of the system relies on its high specificity, achieved by conditional activation and based on a number of genetic changes that take place specifically in cancer cells. Because such changes vary depending on the person or type of tumors, a modular system of such will enable personalized care for each patient.