Safety
Safety is our number one priority!
In our project we focused on three different aspects of safety. The day-to-day safety of our lab work, the safety of our astonishing biosynthetic invention and ethical issues that may rise from our project.
Safety of our lab work
In our laboratory we were determined to prevent accidents of any kind. Since we worked at MIGAL – Galilee Research Institute laboratory we were obligated to the institutional safety regulations, but we also added our own instructions to ensure maximum security. We made sure all used lab coats, gloves, goggles, hair tied back for every individual with long hair, elongated pants and work shoes whenever we engage in wet lab work. There were never a person working alone in the lab, always in pairs to guarantee the safety of our staff. Before we started our wet lab work, we made sure to fill in our team safety forms. As part of our experiments we used only cells and bacteria listed on the White list. We followed a clear protocol and read it fully before start working.
In addition, we have undergone a safety training with the MIGAL Safety Supervisor Amos Guaz regarding the use of hazardous, toxic, biological substances and the handling of their proper disposal according to BLS-2 . We named a responsible for safety on our behalf - Moria Levy. In addition, the entire team went through fire extinguish training and fire safety training. We all learned how to tackle common fire situations, where are the emergency exits and how to operate a fire extinguisher. Our team named first responders in a fire events – Liad Klein and Saar Hamra.
We were instructed how to use a defibrillator and where it is located in the building and, above all, we have in our team two certified medics by Magen David Adom (MDA) Israel, who are ready to provide immediate medical treatment if needed.
Safety of our project
Chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy are the most common types of life saving cancer treatments available nowadays; unfortunately, all are harmful to healthy cells as well as cancerous cells. in recent years immunotherapy emerges as the new approach in fighting cancer – the use of our own sophisticated immune system to detect and eliminate the disease. However, the main problem of cancer immunotherapy is the lack of targetable sites on cancer cells that differentiate them from normal cells. Thus, any non-specifically targeted treatments can be destructive to healthy tissues.
Those facts, among others, led to our goal. We strive to improve the safety of treatments offered to cancer patients today by developing a new genetic tool, which will potentially eliminate all cancer treatment side effects and help prevent the development of secondary diseases that can occur as a result of those treatment. Our team has created a new transcriptional targeting machine as the basis for multiple gene therapy applications designed to maximize safety of treatment. We plan to use this tool to insert self-destructive genes to cancerous cell that when expressed will summon the immune system to kill the cell. By nature, any expression in normal cells will cause a lethal reaction as seen in a 2017 cell paper Nissim et al. Therefore, our new genetic tool must be extremely safe to use. This will be accomplished by regulating the expression of our gene of interest in a specific cell by placing the gene downstream of a target cell-specific promoter, use it in a logic AND gate based on two promoters, one on each plasmid, and forcing it to operate by virtue of a novel trans-splicing mechanism. By doing so we will deceive the spliceosome to create hybrid mRNAs of choice only when those two inputs are present together in the cell, but with no fear it will create any protein when only one promoter works, shown to be an inevitable outcome in the design presented in the 2017 cell paper by Nissim et al.
On ethics and accountability
To guarantee our project is safe from every aspect we decided to meet up with several professors in the field and ask their opinion on our project. For more information please visit our human practice page.