Lorem Ipsum

Cancer recurrence is one of the fears that almost every patient undergoing chemotherapy develops. Recent findings suggest that only a small fraction of the tumor cells, called Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) are able to drive the growth of the tumor. CSCs also show an increased drug resistance, and could remain unaffected after chemotherapy, eventually resulting in the formation of a new tumor. The Westminster iGEM 2012 team aims to combat cancer recurrence by using one key feature of CSCs – increased Aldehyde Dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity. We aim to characterise the promoters for a range of ALDH isoforms and combine synthetic biology and fluorescence techniques to identify and eliminate these cells, offering a novel tool for cancer diagnosis and treatment. The Cancer Stem Cell Theory shows that not all the cells in the tumor have the same ability to divide. Tumor growth is mostly driven by a small proportion of cells that we call Cancer Stem Cells (CSC). The CSC are not only good at proliferating, they are very resistant to chemotherapy drugs as well. This means that while the regular cancer cells are killed, CSC may remain unaffected and give rise to new tumors after the treatment stops. CSC also produce increased levels of a particular enzyme, Aldehyde Dehydrogenase. We have identified the 3 most frequent isoforms (ALDH1A1, ALDH1A3 and ALDH3A1)in aggressive types of cancer, and used their gene promoters to build our CSC-targeting constructs: the iSTEM (Synthetic Tumor Eliminating Machine).