Team:BSC United/Description
PROJECT
DESCRIPTION
Our Motivation
A report from World Health Organization revealed that there were already 422 million diabetics worldwide in 2014 and the number continued to rise these years. Traditional treatment involves insulin injection which requires patients to monitor their blood sugar level and inject insulin once or several times a day. What if diabetes could be treated only with implantation of bacteria in our guts, rather than painful insulin injection? That would be a great breakthrough that can benefit , even though there is still a large gap to close. We have to figure out how to establish a co-culture system that can function as both a glucose detector and a medicine producer, how to conduct the implantation of such a bacterial system into a patient’s body, and whether the bacteria would exert potential harm to the patients or the environment. We haven’t solved the whole puzzle yet, but we’ve accomplished an in-vitro model of how the proinsulin generated by engineered bacteria works on liver cells.
Intro to Diabetes
If we are to fight against diabetes, we need to first understand its mechanism. There are two types of diabetes: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 diabetes results from autoimmune-mediated destruction of the pancreatic β-cell, resulting in the need for exogenous insulin treatment. Type 2 diabetes is often a milder form of diabetes than type 1. With Type 2 diabetes, the pancreas usually produces some insulin. But either the amount produced is not enough for the body's needs, or the body's cells are resistant to it. There is no cure for diabetes, but we can control its additional harm to organs and nerves. Early phases of type 2 diabetes can be treated with dietary control and regular exercise; however, the treatment to type 1 diabetes is dependent on insulin injection. And now we are striving to develop a new method to release insulin in our body instead of the traditional painful way.
Our Approach
Our model is composed of several parts: an organ chip to simulate a human liver, a pair of electrochemical biosensors to determine glucose level, a hardware device to process and send electrical signals, an app to record and demonstrate the result, and most importantly the engineered bacteria that produce proinsulin. It mimics the process that after our engineered bacteria are planted in guts, they produce proinsulin absorbed and transported to the liver and other parts of the body, and then the cells start to transform glucose into glycogen for storage. And the result is so satisfying that our engineered bacteria successfully produce proinsulin which reduces the glucose level.
Conclusion
The success of our in vitro model is a proof that the therapy in our expectation is viable and promising. Moreover, the model can be applied in other tests regarding different chemicals and organs, once the components in the channels and cells are changed.
