Team:SUSTech Shenzhen/Human Practices
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Standard & Integrated Human Practices
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Integrated Human Practices
During the design of our project, we attached great importance on consulting and getting feedback from people out of our lab. We take their suggestions and feedbacks seriously and integrated them into our later project design as well as public engagement activities.
Interview with Professor Ren Huan
Since the original inspiration of our project is derived from cell behavior in cytotherapy, we invited Professor Ren Huan from SUSTech School of Medicine. She is an expert on immunology and we visited her to know about detailed cases about cytotherapy and the feasibility of our tentatively designed light-controlled cell lines on therapeutic use. During the interview, prefessor Ren first affirmed and encouraged our overall project, then introduced some cases of the cancer cytotherapy such as IL2 transfected T cell. She was intersted in the capability of light to precisely control a cell behavior, but she also suggested us to foucus on fundemental mechanisms of cell instead of trying to "design another cytotherapy". Her suggestion is very important to us because developing a therapy is too complicated to a one-year project and our expriment condition is not capable for various medical in vivo tests involved in development of cytotherapy. She also suggested us to conduct a further social investigation in local hospitals to obtain more information from doctors and nurses to know more about differences between foundational reasearch and medical thrapeutic strategies. We integrated Professor Ren's suggestions and shifted our foucus to fundemental biological question behind behavior regulation in cytotherapy. We also accepted professor Ren's advice of visiting a hospital to obtian further knowledge.
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Interview with Professor Hou Shengtao
During the design of our project experiment, we had a deep conversation with Professor Hou Shengtao from SUSTech Biology department. Professor Hou is a senior expert on human physiology. At the time, we focused on how to guarantee the efficacy of our light-control inducers and the design of our automatic hardware system. He provided us four important suggestions and strategies on both experiment design and hardware construction and we successfully integrated them into our project. First, he suggested us to form a closed-loop of logic, which means to combine experiment and model together and guide the other aspect with the data or model we already have. His second advise is that our hardware should also be integrated into that logic loop. He said that combination of an automatic sample collection system and a high-efficient detecting method can enable us to obtain more stable and convincing data. We noted down those advise and did pratical refinement on our experiment and hardware.
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Research in hospital
Limited by our basic research, almost all of our previous HP activities were carried out in the school, so we urgently need an HP activity out of the school to truly communicate with people in the society. So we submitted an application to the medical school of our university and participated in the investigation and research of Shenzhen people's hospital.
The whole research consists of three parts：
Interview with health care workers
In the morning, we were divided into two teams. One team went to the oncology radiotherapy department and the other team went to the oncology department. The medical staff in the radiotherapy department told us about many cases of surgery and the requirements of clinical trials, and also stressed the importance of dose for radiobiology research. The doctors in oncology department told us about the collateral damage and improvement of some traditional cancer therapies such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy, introduced some clinical studies of new therapies, and made Suggestions and guidance for our project such as blue light regulation. We also learn from social ethical issues such as the use of human cells, drug prices, psychological changes of patients, and psychological changes of medical staff.
Attend the lecture in biological treatment room
In the afternoon, we had the honor to visit the biological treatment room of the hospital. Teachers in the biological therapy room have been studying the progress and application of tumor immunotherapy. First of all, the teacher told us the development history of immunotherapy and the mechanism of existing immunotherapy. The detailed explanation made us non-experimental group students' understanding and logic of the experiment clear. Then we began to discuss freely with the teacher, really feel benefited a lot. They focus more on curative effects and find problems from pathology rather than quantitative analysis.
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Project Outreach (Standard HP and Public Engagement)
Despite our project is focused on a fundemental biology, we also considered a bigger picture of our project's outreach. Firstly, from the difficulties we faced when modelling the predictive behavior of mammalian cells, we found that the complexity of our cells is also a blind area of public awareness. We realized that popularization of the concept of “complex cell behavior” can efficiently help the public to understand better on how the human body works. Hence, we conducted human practices activities on the concept of "Complexity of cell behavior". Secondly, we wanted to find if the quantitative methodology in synthetic biology can benefit doctor's treatment to cancer patient. Hence, we introduced our model-based cell behavior control system to docters in Shenzhen Renmin Hospital. For more details, please refer to our public engagement activities.