Team:Hong Kong HKU/Human Practices
Human Practices
Integrated Human Practices
Our team goes beyond the lab and seek advice from not only experts in cancer research field, but also the general public to understand the capability of our project to fit in the real-world context.
Expert’s Opinions
We explained our project during the interviews with experts in the field. They gave us some suggestions on how to improve the project design. At early stage, we planned to use a chemotherapeutic drug to inhibit liver tumour growth. However, researchers pointed out the inefficiency of this kind of cancer treatment as the key population, cancer stem cells, would not be eliminated by the drug due to the stemness properties. Therefore, we decided to develop a combined therapy along with molecular targeting, so as to increase the effectiveness by solving the root cause.
We interviewed Dr. Ma, Associate Professor of School of Biomedical Sciences in The University of Hong Kong. As an expert working on cancer stemness, she expressed her interest in our cancer stem cell-targeted drug delivery system. She appreciated our approach to diminish stemness of cancer cells for drug efficacy enhancement and the biodegradable delivery system. One of the concerns Dr. Ma has raised is the convincibility of our result. She advised us to further verify our DNA nanostructure and the flagella gene overexpression with microscopy modalities which we incorporated her ideas into our project accordingly. We utilised transmission electron microscope (TEM) and the scanning electron microscope (SEM) to visualize our nanostructure and the salmonella flagella. Those images help demonstrating the successful assembly of the tetrahedron and the quantity of flagella. The proofs help making our results more convincing. Not just the experts of cancer research, we also engaged a professor from the medical law area. He conveyed his concern that the Biosafety Level for Salmonella Typhimurium is rather high (level 2/3) as a vaccination agent, therefore it might be controversial if it is used in clinical trials. To resolve it, we adopted an attenuated strain of Salmonella Typhimurium SL7207, which its virulent gene aroA is shut down. On top of that, we modified the design of our Nano-drug carrier, an aptamer with high affinity to Salmonella is added to enhance the specificity for the bacteria to invade the core tumor micro-environment. Higher accumulation of Salmonella
To further revise of our project towards clinical trials, Dr. Ma recommended us several research techniques that examine the stemness regulation. We could perform Limiting Dilution Assay on mouse model to define the frequency of stem cells in the treated cell culture.
Mini SynBio Lecture for Secondary School Students
Aside from labs program, HKU IGEM Team has also devoted indefatigable efforts in promoting public engagement in science and technology. Since bacteria engineering and molecular biology are rarely covered in Hong Kong secondary school curriculum, the knowledge gap between secondary and higher education often exists, to some degree, deterring students from pursuing the area of applied biology and biotechnology. We held a mini-lecture in S.K.H. Li Ping Secondary School this summer, and introduced the background information and current uses of synthetic biology, ranging from plasmid manipulation to transgenic mouse technique. Moreover, ethical dilemmas and legal issues are inevitable in modern biomedical research, and case study therefore was included in our science lecture, such as patent practice in the pharmaceutical industry and human genome editing.
CUHK Symposium
Promoting our project to science community is also a cardinal part in IGEM human practice. We have attended a symposium held in The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and presented our project to a number of talented researchers in the area of synthetic biology, as well as high school IGEM teams. Valuable suggestions pertaining to our project direction and in vitro model of salmonella invasion were kindly provided. In addition, we were also inspired by other IGEM Teams with their stupendous project designs, and later adopted a more eclectic approach in enhancing salmonella invasion efficiency.
The 52nd Joint School Science Exhibition
Getting public understanding is critical in science innovation. Our team went beyond the laboratory and stepped out to the society. We introduced our project to high school students and audience from diverse age group in the exhibition. It was a precious opportunity for us to get to know their concern on synthetic biology and biotechnology. Apart from the appreciation of our novel drug delivery system, safety concern was frequently raised by the general public. This encouraged us to take a deeper look at the real-life application of our product. There were other teams working on various fields in the exhibition as well. We shared our experience and skills with each other, forming a knowledge exchange platform.