Team:Nanjing NFLS/Overview

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• Human Practices
  • Overview
  • Integrated Human Practices
  • Public Engagement
• Judging

• Home
• Project
  • Description
  • Background
  • Design
  • Experiment
  • Demonstrate
  • Notebook
  • Vision
• Parts
• Safety
• Model
• Team
  • Team Members
  • Attributions
  • Collaborations
• Human Practices
  • Overview
  • Integrated Human Practices
  • Public Engagement
• Judging

Overview

• Approach
  • Whom does this project concern?
  • How can human practices guide us?
• Impact
  • Silver
  • Gold—Integrated HP

PHOCS system

 Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work. Inspired by aim of human practices, we raised two questions to ourselves.

1.       Whom does this project concern?

2.       How can human practices guide us?

To answer these questions, we designed the new human practices system this year – P.H.O.C.S. system.

Approach

Whom does this project concern?

The name of “PHOCS” is made up of respective initials of “Public”, “Hospital”, “Official”, “College” and “School”. Public can tell us the general understanding of synthetic biology and cancer. Hospitals are the most directly related place for our project. Center of Disease Control (CDC) can offer us the most official statistics. We promote iGEM and synthetic biology in high schools and primary schools, we gave fun lectures on cancer, bioethics and life. Moreover, we are willing to communicate with university professors to expand our vision. Covering “Public”, “Hospital”, “Official”, “College” and “School “the “PHOCS” system can effectively guide us to achieve integrated human practices.

How can human practices guide us?

Human practices will affect society and us mainly from two aspects: integrated HP and public engagement. Each category serves to guide and help us better understand our project. We were eventually able to apply our ‘Trojan horse’ to HCC therapeutic.Through extensive discussions with doctors, patients, university professors, researchers. We also reach out to the public to raise awareness of cancer treatment and synthetic biology.

This is the PHOCS system, a complete and effective human practices system. To get more information, please see Integrated Human Practices and Public Engagement and Education

 

Impact

Silver

Our Human Practice system includes active engagement with Public, Hospitals, Officials, Colleges, and Schools. Through these activities, we find our 'Trojan Horse' is valuable to HCC therapeutic. We raised public awareness of HCC, our project, and synthetic biology.

 

First, we conducted a public survey on cancer and synthetic biology. We realized that the public’s understanding about HCC is generally shallow and misguided. Furthermore, most people are not familiar with the term synthetic biology despite their optimism. Therefore, we delivered leaflets that discussed cancer and our project. We also promoted synthetic biology on WeChat, a popular social media in China. The survey guided our public engagement and educational activities, and brought our project closer to the public.

 

Second, we realized the importance of promotion in schools. So, we continued the NFLS Synthetic Biology Club to widen the influence of our project. We organized diverse activities combining synthetic biology and other subjects, including debate, painting competition, seminars, and baking. The popularity of our club increased greatly this year in the fun forms at school. On the other hand, we hold 9 seminars in 2 primary schools in Nanjing in order to generate interest in biology in the younger generation.

 

Finally, bioethics is crucial in the therapeutic field. Thus, we visited professors in the humanity department and learned the process of ethical review. We also start conversations on bioethics as early as possible with students to cultivate their sense of responsibility. These communications taught all team members about the significance of bioethics and how it effectively works in therapeutic.

To get more information, please see Integrated Human Practices and Public Engagement and Education

 

Gold—Integrated HP

We integrated our human practice into our project.

 

First, our project starts with human practices. To confirm the necessity of the project, we adopted big data offered by Jiangsu CDC on liver cancer incident rate and patient distribution. Later, we conduct an online survey on Chinese people’s awareness of cancer and cancer therapy, and we find out most people have insufficient understanding of this disease yet welcome the application of synthetic biology and immunology on cancer treatment. Therefore, we consider it urgent to base our project on immunotherapy and advance our project through effective Human Practices.

 

Second, our project was revised by human practices. In May, we visited Prof. Ho from China Pharmaceutical University (CPU) to learn more about immunotherapy and neoantigens. To avoid the problem of high heterogeneity of tumor neoantigen she mentioned, we decided to artificially construct neoantigen. Based on Ho's advice, we established our first version of the project (the HBsAg ‘Trojan Horse’ expression system).

 

In July, we interviewed Dr. Ling and Dr. Wu from Jiangsu Hospital of Chinese Medicine. They expressed their concern in our project’s safety and suggest “double insurance”. Inspired by this discussion, we adopt the mechanism of competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) and miRNA and realized our second version of CITHA. We also exchanged ideas with other iGEM teams and experts on synthetic biology during our attendance conferences like Nanjing meetup, 6th Conference of China iGEMer Community. CPU_CHINA shared their opinion of tumor-specific promoter choice and introduced hTERT they used last year to us.

 

Third, we brought our project to experts specialized in liver cancer fields. We demonstrated how our project can be used in therapy fields to Dr. Zhu and Dr. Ge in JSCDC and received positive feedbacks. We talked about the application of CITHA and learned that the idea of employing “Trojan Horse” in different types of cancer with their respective promoters and “Trojan Horse” antigen.

To get more information, please see Integrated Human Practices