The steady increase in wealth of East Asian nations during the past few decades has seen the population transition towards diets comprising more fats and less fibre. And there is general consensus among the scientific and medical community that such a diet leads to higher incidence of colorectal cancer. Public health bodies including the World Health Organization (WHO) and National Cancer Centre of Singapore (NCCS) therefore predict that current increasing trends in colorectal cancer will only continue.

Hong Kong, being a region that started developing earlier, observed a 190% increase in the crude rate of colorectal cancer incidence between 1983 and 2006. (See this document.) It is on track to overtake lung cancer soon as Hong Kong’s deadliest form of cancer.

Thus we decided that at least one of our human practice activities would have to involve interacting with the local cancer therapy community in a certain way.

Our work this year on colorectal cancer happened to coincide with a large awareness effort by the Hong Kong Cancer Fund (HKCF) on the same topic. It therefore made perfect sense for us to contact them with the intention of forming a collaboration.

The HKCF is an influential force in Hong Kong with interests in promoting awareness about cancer and providing psychotherapy for cancer patients. They also provide funding for cancer therapy-related research efforts.

We approached them in the hope of spreading word about synthetic biology and other topics on the forefront of life science and bioengineering, and in particular inform them on notable ways cancer treatment is being pushed forward. Introduction to the field of synthetic biology was very exciting for our HKCF contacts. We were soon invited to speak about the topic at the Fund’s Wong Tai Sin ‘CancerLink’ centre.

Our audience was aged within their 30s and 40s and were (mostly female) volunteer nurses and administrative staff who work closely with cancer patients in the process of recovery. Some directly administer psychotherapy to these patients. We were asked to assume little to no scientific knowledge which was to be an extremely important factor in our considerations. Countless iGEM teams in the past have had to deal with the problem of communicating synthetic biology in a straightforward way. We approached it by employing several (sometimes cute) analogies and providing a significant amount of time for Q&A.