Team:Jiangsu High School/Human Practices
Integrated Human Practice
Summary
The overall result of our research is considered as positive. Apart from the positive results in the laboratory, the social activities that our group has done are all considered influential. These activities included a street interview, handing out brochures in the CBD of Nanjing; but out of all of these activities, interviewing the chief doctor Chengcai Xia of the department of psychiatry of Jiangsu Provincial People's Hospital in Pukou, visiting the nursing home, as well as fundraising were the most significant activities. Dr.Xia mentions about the best way to prevent Alzheimer's is daily brain exercise. Most of the elders get the Alzheimer's because they do not have enough thinking going on. Moreover, our group also get to know that Alzheimer's cannot be fully cured, which leads to the consequences that doctors of different hospitals feel reluctant to treat these patients since they will not have an outcome to make themselves proud. Therefore, preventing Alzheimer's shall start with the elders themselves. Our group then went to the nursing home, apart from offering the elders in the community some gifts, we were there to advocate brain exercise on a daily bases. Lastly, fundraising allowed the middle-aged people to notice this potential problem, and start preventing it in the early stage.
Purpose
Alzheimer's disease is a symptom that affects one's body by impairing parts of the brain. Brains contain mainly neuron cells, which is irreparable. Yet there are currently 47 million patients globally; by 2050, the estimated population of patients will reach 132 million. Above all, many elders around us are eventually getting the Alzheimer's; this is the inspiration for us to organize our team. The purpose of our team is to research and develop a medication to prevent further expansion of Alzheimer's disease in both the human brain and the global population. The medication as our goal will only be at the particle level and might or can have the potential of succeeding a medication at the human level. To achieve this, our team has done a series of experiments to develop the potential cure for this the Alzheimer's. The development process mainly consists of the incubation and selection of cells, including plasmid transformation, amplification, extraction which then allow transfections happen for our group to observe; and lastly autophagy flow detection is employed to test the results of the medication that our team has discovered. All of the hard work was done not only because there is a great demand of a medication for the Alzheimer's disease globally, but also because there is a great lack of attention of this disease since it is not fatal. Our team does understand the feelings for not desperately getting medication for the patients as well as doctors putting the Alzheimer's patients as minor patients, but we have to allow everyone to be aware that there are 47 millions of elders around us are getting the disease and it is yet still increasing. Therefore, we must raise attention to allow people, especially the elders, to look at the situation from a slightly better perspective.
Design
With our professors and instructors' guidance, our experimental topic was set to be Identify A Potential Compound Which Cures Alzheimer's Disease Through The Autophagy Path. Although there are a lot of Alzheimer's sufferers around the world and in China, there isn't an affective medicine to help them , so our team decided we are going to help. After setting the topic, we are facing other problems. After interviewing and talking to our professors, we found out that we need more support from the society.
The participation and help Anti-AD has received from the doctors played a crucial role to the success of our human practices and experiments. At the start, our survey was not in the final yet, but after interviewing Dr. Chengcai Xia (the chief doctor of the department of psychiatry of Jiangsu Provincial People's Hospital in Pukou), our team was able to finalize our survey. Dr.Xia provided us with vital data to further improve our survey into something that is not only benefiting our research project, but also something that contains basic information that could help the public better understand Alzheimer. Throughout our journey, besides that Dr.Xia lent us a hand, Dr. Zhiyuan Zhu (a former associate professor at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences) also made a big contribution to our work. During the early phases of our experiment, the bacteria we have cultured was too dense and it was hard to pick out one to continue our next planned step. As we became stuck on this problem, Dr.Zhu came to the rescue. Dr.Zhu, a seasoned Alzheimer researcher, suggested us to lower the concentration when first culturing the bacteria. Though we were lost at first, the glimmer of hope that Dr.Zhu showed us allowed us to successfully continue with our experiment. This magnificent journey would not be whole without our two beloved doctors.
From the discussion that we had with our professors, we found out that we need to enhance our social influence and inform more and more people of our topic. So we decided to hand out surveys as well as giving out informational speech to others. In those ways, we will be able to have a larger social influence in our community.
Our final version questionnaire include three topics that we are curious about.
1) Have most people met people that have Alzheimer's? Do their relatives or friends have Alzheimer's?
2) Do most people know about the symptoms of Alzheimer's?
3) Do the public know any way of preventing or curing Alzheimer's?
Then we divided those three topics into eleven questions. Through conducting the survey, we hope to know whether the public know sufficient information of Alzheimer's Disease, and from there, we are going to spread the basic knowledge of AD and also about our project.
Execution
Alzheimer's disease is becoming an increasingly severe problem around the world. According to a statistic, globally there will be one new case every 3 seconds. 50 million people living worldwide are already living with Alzheimer's disease, and this number will triple to 152 million by 2030. Yet the current situation of medication development is not promising as well. The failure-to-approval ratio for new Alzheimer's medicines is only 30 to 1. From 1998 to 2014, only 3 drugs received approval for treatment of symptoms. With this in mind, we aim to seek a potential compound which can cure this disease through an approach fundamentally different from other medicines': it incorporates autophagy, a biological process inherent in each cell, to let the neurons themselves clear toxins that could induce the development of Alzheimer's disease. Therefore, this approach will less likely bring side effects and since can be approved more easily by drug administration, giving more opportunity for patients to reduce their struggle with the disease. Moreover, since autophagic process exists in virtually every cell of the human body, it can also be applied in other kinds of new medications to remove disease-inducing-toxins. Thus, autophagy is a versatile and powerful solution for new medicine developments.
In order to know the public understanding of Alzheimer, we made a questionnaire and conducted both online and offline survey, we also publicize it in our Wechat official account. From the results of the questionnaire, we can see that most people's understanding of Alzheimer's disease is still in the preliminary stage. Although some people have been in contact with patients, their knowledge of the treatment for Alzheimer's remains unclear. 98 percent of the public is completely ignorant about doing blood tests that can detect the possibility of developing Alzheimer. Through this survey, we found that the general public has little comprehension of Alzheimer. Although they know the basic knowledge of it , they cannot take good care of patients. There is also no awareness of caring this group in the society.