Introducing: ACDC - OHSU Portland iGEM 2022

We are Team Portland. Based in the Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center(CEDAR) at the Knight Cancer Research Institute (OHSU) we are eagerly searching for ways to detect and stop lethan cancers at the earlist stage because early detection saves lives. This is an ambitious goal, one that requires novelty, creativity, and innovation.

Our project seeks to create a more accessible, cost-effective alternative to the present models of detecting the overexpression of c-Myc mRNA. We aim to create a cancer early detection diagnostic tool that most clinicians can acquire in order to determine if their patients may have cancer by taking their patient’s blood sample and inputting that sample onto an agar plate with our bioengineered E. coli bacteria, which will be designed to proliferate only in the presence of cancerous c-Myc mRNA.

Two-thirds of our project has been completed so far. The design of our project is inspired from the work from Collins et al. which found that they were able to engineer guide RNA (gRNA) switches to be made conditionally active in the presence of specific “trigger” RNA sequences (2021). Our project attempts to take what was done in the Collins et al. project a step further. Once our project is complete, we would have a culture of E. coli bacteria that have gRNA that are conditionally active in the presence of exogenous c-Myc mRNA. The E. coli would be designed to react to the presence of exogenous c-Myc mRNA by proliferating. In the absence of c-Myc, the E. coli would be designed to express a toxin that would eliminate the E. coli, effectively creating a growth-no growth diagnostic tool that detects the presence of c-Myc and therefore allows for the potential detection of cancer in its early stages.