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Revision as of 22:00, 20 October 2019
Human practices are meant to explain why our project is important to the world. Here we present how we do an intense work to inform the people of Costa Rica about Synthetic Biology, iGEM and the new possibilities of Engineered Probiotics.
Antibiotic resistance: A global problem
Since we were brainstorming about possible problems to be addressed, we quickly (not so much) stumbled upon the issue of antibiotic resistance. This phenomenon is expected to provoke up to 10 million annual deaths by 2050 (O'Neill, 2014), possibly the first death cause worldwide. This has lead the United Nations to declare antibiotic resistance as one of the greatest threats to global public health.
Resistant bacterial infections: Choosing our project aim
Antibiotic resistance is an exponential growing problem around the world and it has a very serious social impact. Looking for a solution to this problem we focused on a gastrointestinal pathogen, Clostridioides difficile. This bacteria infected patients in 21 of the 29 hospitals of Costa Rica from 2011-2014. Even one of our team members have suffered from this illness.
Problems:
Awareness for antibiotic resistance is lacking
There is a worldwide ignorance on the subject of microbial resistance to antibiotics and Costa Rica is not the exception. Globally, the main cause of this problem is the misuse of antibiotics, leading to the survival of some resistant bacteria, able to spread again. Also, the bad waste management of these drugs contributes to increase resistant bacteria. This bacteria can later transfer their resistance to human microbiota (van Rijn et al., 2019).
Research is being conducted to discover new antibiotics. However, only two new antibiotic classes (lipopeptides and oxazolidinones) have been developed and approved by international drug agencies (US Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency) in the last three decades (Tacconelli et al., 2018). The field of antibiotics is not lucrative enough for pharmaceutical companies and newly discovered compounds remain similar in function to current antibiotics. As a result, only a few large companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Merck and Roche are still actively engaged in antibiotic research and development (Jackson, Czaplewski & Piddock, 2018).
During our problems exploration we realized antibiotic resistance consists of the two problems mentioned above. Therefore, we decided to go out the lab to help create awareness on antibiotic resistance in our country and prove the prevalence of antibiotic resistance bacteria using the agar antibiotic resistance test.
Larger agar antibiotic resistance test
We went to the streets to have a closer encounter with people. In total we sampled 10 different places of Costa Rica: La Agonía Park in Alajuela, Central Park in Heredia, Central Park in Cartago and seven different places in San Jose (Central Park, El Mercado Central, La Sabana Metropolitan Park, France Park and the buses stations from Limón, Puntarenas and Liberia). We talked to 100 Costa Ricans, explained them a little bit of our problem and sampled their mouth with sterile swabs and following the National Health Ministry regulations. Samples were grown in petri dishes supplemented with amoxicillin (antibiotic most commonly used in Costa Rica) for 24h at 37 °C.
References
Jackson, N., Czaplewski, L., & Piddock, L. J. (2018). Discovery and development of new antibacterial drugs: learning
from experience?. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, 73(6), 1452-1459.
O’Neill, J. (2014). Antimicrobial resistance. Tackling a Crisis for the Health and Wealth of
Nations.
Tacconelli, E., Carrara, E., Savoldi, A., Harbarth, S., Mendelson, M., Monnet, D. L., ... &
Ouellette, M. (2018). Discovery, research, and development of new antibiotics: the WHO priority list of
antibiotic-resistant bacteria and tuberculosis. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 18(3), 318-327.
van Rijn, M., Haverkate, M., Achterberg, P., & Timen, A. (2019). The public uptake of
information about antibiotic resistance in the Netherlands. Public Understanding of Science, 28(4),
486-503.