On August 1, 2024, the Squirrel-Beijing-Ⅱ team successfully organized its first offline event in Beijing’s Sanlitun. The primary objective of this event was to expand the project’s influence and reach, raising public awareness about esophageal cancer and the issues related to this condition.

The event featured flyers and exhibition boards, which were developed in collaboration with four teams. The flyers were designed in a reversible format, providing information about esophageal cancer on one side and details about the project on the other. Additionally, QR codes were included on the boards, allowing visitors to access further information.

The activities were divided into two key components: sticker collection and flyer distribution. The stickers highlighted esophageal cancer symptoms and similar conditions, encouraging participants to take them as symbols of awareness. Team members also engaged with passersby, presenting the project and conveying its key messages.

Despite careful planning, the event encountered several unexpected challenges. Some teachers were initially reluctant to approve certain setup aspects, and maintaining audience engagement proved difficult. However, at the beginning, we faced a huge challenge because of the venue of the exhibition board, and later, through the teacher's patient negotiation, we successfully won the location of our publicity. Many group members who distributed leaflets were also rejected by passers-by, but they did not give up and still patiently hoped that more people could participate. These obstacles provide valuable learning experiences for the future.

This offline promotion event marked a crucial initial step in the team’s broader campaign to raise awareness about esophageal cancer. Moving forward, Going forward, we will reflect on this experience and consider how we can further advance their mission of leading esophageal cancer awareness efforts.

In our online meeting, we mainly popularized the relevant knowledge about esophageal cancer. The following is what we know about the symptoms of esophageal cancer: Progressive dysphagia is a common clinical manifestation of esophageal cancer.
When patients swallow food, there is temporary poststernal food retention, such as the sensation of gas blocking food, especially when they take the first bite of food in the morning. In the early stages of the disease, because the lump is relatively small, it has little impact on eating, so it is easy to be ignored. When the mass is gradually enlarged and the esophageal cavity is narrow, the patient has progressive dysphagia. It is difficult to swallow dry food at first, then semi-liquid food, and finally even saliva and water can not be swallowed. Obvious sensation of eating foreign objects
Difficulty swallowing liquid
Hoarseness

Pain behind sternum . When patients have difficulty swallowing food, they may have a feeling of pain behind the sternum, manifested as dull pain and burning pain, which worsens with eating. If the food is hot, the food is acidic, and the pain is more obvious. The pain can be relieved after the food is swallowed. The advanced tumor completely blocked the esophagus and made it impossible to swallow.
The tumor may spread and cause pain in other parts of the body

Considering our team is based in China, we believe it’ll be useful to create an official account on wechat - the social media and communication platform most frequently used in China.

In our official account, we published articles evolve around oesophageal cancer and our lozenge, as well as an introduction to iGEM and the history of synthetic biology. We believe by publishing educational articles on a regular basis (every week), our subscribers can be well entertained by our content and they can obtain some new information as well. Additionally, to make our articles more interesting, we put all information on posters with sophisticated designs on the side. We also avoided putting over-complicated content on the posters as we thought that would discourage subscribers from keep reading. Instead we changed them to more understandable terms and provided examples for readers to understand.

Acknowledging the importance of history, we introduced the history of synthetic biology in depth in two posts as well as iGEM. By doing so, we believe our subscribers can obtain a more comprehensive view on the whole picture, as well as the importance of synthetic biology. This also provided more purposes to our project.