LOTUS

Don't FRET

Japan is known for its healthy lifestyle, advanced medical technology, and long life expectancy. However, the rates of breast cancer continue to increase on a yearly basis and are the leading cause of death among women in Japan. Current screening methods, including mammograms and MRIs, can be uncomfortable and costly, discouraging many women from regular screening.

Our goal for this year’s project is to spread awareness on breast cancer and to create a minimally-invasive breast cancer detection kit that will be administered at clinics in hopes to make breast cancer screening more accessible and less uncomfortable. Since there is a

we believe that our proposed kit has great potential in alleviating the current condition of breast cancer in Japan.

From our initial research, we learned that the Mucin 1 biomarker is overexpressed in breast cancer patients. Our initial approach to detect concentrations of Mucin 1 was using a Lateral Flow Assay. However, we switched to Aptamer FRET this year upon learning that Lateral Flow Assays are less accurate than expected.

With the FRET method, we are able to use fluorescence values measured through the 96 wellplate rader to detect Mucin 1 biomarker concentrations. From the biomarker concentrations, a medical professional will be able to decide if a person requires additional breast cancer screening to receive a diagnosis.

Our Promotion Video

The repository used to create this website is available at gitlab.igem.org/2022/asij-tokyo.