Students at Shenzhen University (SZU) are once again proudly holding gold medals as winners of this year’s International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM), which took place in Boston earlier this month.

    This is the second time the SZU team has won gold at the competition. The team received their first gold medal last year.

    The team’s winning project was designed to detect bladder tumor cells and is a significant new machine for detecting and curing cancer, which greatly impressed the judges.

    Though it was not the first time the team won a gold medal at iGEM, the supervisor of the team, Chen Weizhao, was overwhelmed by the excitement. “It is really a challenging task for our students to compete with such talented students from the world’s top universities, but winning the gold medal proves that students from Shenzhen University are capable of inventing cutting-edge projects,” said Chen.

    Wang Yongyi, one of the students on the team, said that the competition offered them an opportunity to compete with students from the most elite universities and also helped them see the gap between them and the others and, therefore, encouraged them to work harder.

    Teams from Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, Tsinghua, Zhejiang and Peking University also won gold medals. (Zhang Qian)