The University of Macau (UM) recently celebrated its sixth consecutive win at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition, after a group of 30 UM undergraduates bagged a silver medal at this year’s edition, which was held in Paris from 2 to 5 November.
According to a UM statement, the students were competing against over 400 teams, which were made up of more than 5,000 students from universities around the world. The UM team, managed to win silver through its project “CarvengerX: Novel Exosomal Tumour Therapy Using Bidirectional Calcium Overload Platform Built with Synthetic Biology,” which stops cancer cells with a novel exosome-based therapeutic approach.
The university noted that “this innovative system has the potential to provide a specific, effective, and safe cancer therapy, offering new hope for patients who do not respond to existing treatments.”
[See more: The University of Macau climbs up the World University Rankings again]
As part of the project, the UM team – which was mentored by Garry Wong and Lee Tsz On from the UM Faculty of Health Sciences – was required to communicate with the community, doctors and professors, besides conducting experiments. The students also developed a number of different models that were used to make predictions about their experiments.
During the course of the project, the UM team surmounted a number of communication and development challenges, with the team leader, Wei Ning, pointing out that the competition “enriched their professional knowledge” and helped them to build relationships with “many like-minded friends.”
Inaugurated in 2003, the iGEM Competition is an international event that looks to promote synthetic biology by inviting high school, undergraduate and graduate students to create relevant projects.
