Team:UCL/Safety

• Human Practices
  Summary Public Engagement Human Practices Expert Guidance Little LEAF
• Modelling
  Summary Structural Dynamic
• Results
  Summary Characterize Validate Improve Demonstrate
• Method
  Safety Experimental Protocols Notebook
• Design
  Overview Parts Best Basic Part Best Composite Part
• People
  Team Attributions Collaborations Sponsors

Introduction Lab Work Outreach Ethics

General Safety:

Manufacturing a novel drug that may potentially be delivered to patients requires careful safety considerations from the very start of development. Below we document the safety practices we used to keep ourselves safe in the lab. In addition, our public engagement and human practices required interaction with vulnerable groups, therefore we carried out risk assessments before all public interactions and engagement activities to ensure the safety of the public we communicated with.

Safety in the Lab:

We nominated a safety officer, our team member Vlad, who ensured we remained safe in the lab and in our work. All team members additionally received training from Brian O’Sullivan, the department’s safety officer. We then completed online courses in Basic Fire Safety, Principles of Laboratory Safety and Principles and Practice of Biosafety. In addition to iGEM’s safety form, we also submitted a departmental risk assessment documenting the potential harmful substances we would be using and our safety precautions and measures before starting wet lab work (shown below).

Cytotoxic Cargo:

In order to work with cytotoxic cargo, we took safety concerns seriously. Our cytotoxic cargo of choice, photosensitizers, are enzymes that produce reactive oxygen species (ROS). Although ROS are dangerous to humans, they are not volatile, and have a similar risk to common lab and even household chemicals such as bleach (peroxide). Nevertheless, as enzymes that produce harmful substances are not on iGEM’s white list, we submitted and received approval from iGEM’s Safety and Security committee before working with the photosensitizers.

Public interaction:

As with any research project, it was essential to safeguard ourselves as well as the people that we interacted with. Risk assessments were made before hosting all of our outreach events (Building with Biology and exhibits of Synthetic Biology and the 5 Senses), and we also completed extensive ethics requirements in order to be able to release our survey to people affected by breast cancer through the breast cancer research charity Breast Cancer Now.

Outreach events:

Copies of our risk assessments for our outreach events (Building with Biology and our New Scientist Live exhibit) can be read below. We had to consider carefully the materials we would include in interactive sessions or exhibits to ensure they did not pose a risk to the members of the public we would be interacting with.

Ethics for Survey and interacting with the Public:

To ensure that we maintained the ethical standards of research, whilst interacting with breast cancer patients, we followed the ethics advice offered to us by the UCL Research Ethics Committee. Before interacting with breast cancer patients, we made sure to apply for and receive ethics approval and for our public engagement events we conducted risk assessments and considered relevant preventative measures (shown below). More information about our ethics process can be found on ou human practices page.

UCL.iGEM@ucl.ac.uk