Integrated Human Practice

Brief introduction

Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer, the 5th leading cause of cancer death in men and the 4th most common cancer overall. The 5-year survival rate is around 100 percent in stage 1 and the 5-year survival rate is around 29 percent in stage 4. It reveals the importance of early diagnosis and urgent need of new diagnosis methods that can encourage people to receive detection regularly. In this case, human practice acts as a crucial role in our project, not only does it improve our research by providing vital comments on improvement, but it also helps achieve our goal of raising awareness of health care for the public.

Our goal is to provide user-friendly, convenient and low-priced prostate cancer diagnostic tests to people in need. This can ensure people with different social status, background and ethnicities can share the same opportunity of having early detection. We have developed a non-invasive and accurate test by creating prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) antibodies for operating lateral flow assay easily without support from professionals. By engineering PSMA antibody sequences using innovative and scientific professional techniques, we can provide a better choice for patients. We hope to carry out our human practice to raise the public's awareness not only to test for prostate cancer, but also to perform early detection on cancer to ensure patients do not miss the golden opportunity of healing where early treatment and a variety of treatment options can be considered. We aim to support patients who face different obstacles and health conditions. Fostering a better understanding between patients and the public.

Social engagement

Not only do we hope to provide information at school, but we also want to bring our findings to the community and provide resources to patients in need. Therefore, we join the meetings with the Hong Kong Cancer Fund, the largest cancer support organisation in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Cancer Fund is dedicated to providing professionals services and advice to cancer patients and their families. This ranges from financial to mental support. They also help cancer patients to get the ability of managing themselves and be able to adapt to society when they recover. It also provides free information or activities about cancer to the public in order to raise public awareness. Not only are they providing financial help to patients, they also highlight the importance of providing psychological help to patients so as to relieve their stress caused by the side effects of treatment and anxiety. They provide workshops to cancer patients to enhance their mental health, suggest possible plans upon recovery and help relieve the psychological burden patients' families are bearing. They strive to always be aligned with cancer patients and ensure that no one is alone when battling cancer. Their goal aligns with our objective of providing mental support and resources to cancer patients.

Education:Hong Kong Cancer Fund underscores the need for raising public awareness and education about cancer to everyone. With the same purpose, we can contribute to this by providing education about prostate cancer. This could involve hosting seminars, organising community talks on the needs of prostate cancer patients. We sincerely hope the public can have a deeper insight into prostate cancer through seminars and educate them to receive diagnosis regularly so as to reduce the risk of getting advanced prostate cancer. Furthermore, we use social media such as Instagram to disseminate useful and accurate information about prostate cancer and raise their awareness by including posts about data concerning the relationship between survival rate and the stage of prostate cancer.

Care for Patients and Families:Hong Kong Cancer Fund provides numerous ways to support patients and families, ranging from forming peer support groups, children counselling groups, the list goes on. With our project, we can help drive these initiatives by organising activities including visiting prostate cancer patients at their homes or elderly centres and teaching them ways of finding personalised community resources.

We sincerely appreciate Dr. Antonio Wong (Honorary Research Associate, Department of Microbiology, The University of Hong Kong) and Professor. C. F. Ng’s (Department of Surgery, Division of Urology, Chinese University of Hong Kong) devotion to our project. Consultation from Dr. Wong provided us with feasible steps in constructing our protein structure. Moreover, Professor Ng’s help is also crucial for us, Professor Ng provided us with key insights on the feasibility of the project and its future direction. With the guidance from experts, we can achieve success in our project.

It is our honour to be able to have the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Ng, Professor of Division of Urology, Department of Surgery of Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an expert in prostate diseases and has revolutionised the diagnostic approach of prostate cancer in the territory. He has given invaluable guidance on our detection method. Remembering that when we were just starting to formulate a plan, we contacted Dr. Ng to ask for his feedback about our project .He gave us professional advice on ways to improve our project and experiment procedure. He has recognized our method of producing a non-invasive, accurate, low-cost rapid test kit through detecting PSMA antigen in urine as an innovative method because the conventional approaches are generally expensive and invasive. He also agreed that our method is valid because PSMA antigen is expressed in all types of prostate tissues and can bind with an antibody with specific combining site to PSMA antigen. He encouraged us to pioneer this particular diagnosing method. When our ELISA kit experiment had succeeded, Dr. Ng further supported our efforts by giving us the urine samples. As such, we are able to put our detection method to test which at the end was proven to be a viable method.

1. Knowing the way to educate the public
   • We have arranged a meeting with Hong Kong Cancer Fund to discuss the details and concerns of organising and holding a talk to the public on the needs of prostate cancer patients. We hope the public can have a deeper insight on prostate cancer through the talk and educate them to receive early diagnosis

 

2. Knowing the world through survey
   • In order to understand people’s attitude and opinions towards prostate cancer and prostate cancer diagnosis, we have conducted a survey to know the thoughts of different people from the world, which helps a lot to our project of the crisis today and for further consultation with cancer patients.

 

3. spreading information of prostate cancer from social media
   • We have set up a social media account to provide information to people from different regions. We provide the statistics of the prostate cancer crisis, recent detection methods and scientific techniques we used. In order to raise people’s awareness, we also include posts about data concerning the relationship between survival rate and the stage of prostate cancer.

 

4. Inspiration from
   • We have actively collaborated with local schools in Hong Kong. The seminar assists us on providing different perspectives and methods to transcend the obstacles with students and experienced teachers from different schools.

Our collaboration with the other iGEM Hong Kong Teams which has provided us with the opportunity to sharing the project ideas especially we can conduct part of the experiment in Yan Oi Tong Tin Ka Ping Secondary School for bacteria incubation. We would like to express our gratitude towards the company assisting us in our pursuit.

DNA STAR

The vital part of our project is antibody synthesis which has received much attention recently since COVID-19 test kits also utilises this technique to produce antibodies with corresponding antigen information. DNA has helped us synthesise antibody sequences from antigen we had given to them. DNA STAR is a crucial component, collaborator and sponsor for our project.

DNA STAR is a startup company which provides professional bioinformatic software for life science research. It provides sequence analysis software used in molecular biology research, protein analysis and protein structure prediction. As a result, due to its purpose and quality biological analysing service, we have been working with them. In our project, we are providing prostate cancer diagnostics tests by lateral flow assay with PSMA antibody. We successfully engineered this antibody from its corresponding antigen. Our successes proved to them that we are not just a group of secondary school students, but an innovative team with diverse knowledge and the drive to make things work. Throughout our research, they were impressed by our clear goal of generating antibody sequences by using antigen sequences. With DNA STAR, we are now looking forward to dealing with an increasing number of antibodies or even protein synthesis on TMEM256 and LAMTOR. We will focus on increasing sensitivity and specificity with the assistance on helping us to find antibodies.

We believe that by walking on our road of continuing discovery of this useful biological technique, we can achieve our goal by improving health conditions around the world. As a result, we are continuously working with DNA STAR. It provides us with lots of help and comments on improvement concerning the laboratory work with the direct help of sponsorship for further development of our plan and making our plan closer to reality.

Legal Consultation

We receive invaluable law information from Mr Wong. Mr Wong is a barrister. He reminded us of adding innovative ideas when formulating genes. Although there are no registered trademark of prostate cancer diagnosis through detecting PSMA in Hong Kong nor Europe, it is possible that our product is not original. We confirm there is no invasion of patency and ensure our detection method is novel. We may further register patents in the future. Also, when we were using human blood samples, he suggested that we need to get a signed consent form and certify that it is legal.

We also need to ensure there is no invasion of privacy. Volunteers that are engaged in our project research would remain anonymous. We should only disclose the research data.Their names and private information must be confidential.

Po Leung Kuk S.F. Lee Creative and Technology Education Development Fund

Other than the supportive guidance, the Po Leung Kuk S.F. Lee Creative and Technology Education Development Fund was established in 2015/16 with a donation of HK$20 million from Mr. Lee Shu Fook for the promotion and development of creative and technology education. The fund provides us with a host of support to PLK affiliated educational institutions to nurture potential students with talent in science. Thanks to the supportive assistance from this fund, not only can we further develop our project in a wider perspective, but it also provides us with more resources and possibilities to navigate the science world by directly alleviating our pressure on purchasing professional equipment. We are truly grateful for their support.

Prostate cancer, being one of the most prevalent forms of cancer found among men, it is believed that early detection is the key for having successful treatments and improving outcomes. Only by undergoing a body check, can we proactively monitor the potential abnormalities caused by prostate cancer. Detecting prostate cancer at an early stage plays a pivotal role as it increases the chances of successful treatment and potentially prevents the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body.

Due to the expensive medical fee nowadays, if one were to test for prostate cancer, it could cost up to USD$6000 or more for a prostate biopsy. Therefore, this has motivated us to push our development forward by launching a urine test kit that costs around USD$25, which can offer accurate and reliable results. This enables individuals to detect prostate cancer at its earliest stages when treatment options are most effective. By eliminating the need for costly and invasive procedures, we aim to remove barriers to testing, ensuring that individuals do not miss their window for recovery.

In order to raise social awareness, we have been consistently updating our Instagram page, posting infographics on @plklfc_igem2023. Feel free to follow us!

 

Novel:

The study of the evolution of novel genes generally focuses on the formation of new coding sequences. However, equally important in the evolution of novel functional genes are the formation of regulatory regions that allow the expression of the genes and the effects of the new genes in the organism as well. Hence, we discuss the current knowledge on the evolution of novel functional genes, and we examine in more detail the youngest genes discovered.