Team:Wageningen UR/Projecttest
Project Overview
Infectious diseases pose a major threat for the world population. Over the last few decades we have seen an increase in the number of outbreaks, related to globalization and growth of the world population. Anticipation and control of rising epidemics has proven to be difficult with the technologies currently available, especially in third-world countries. The 2017 iGEM team of Wageningen University & Research aims to improve this situation by introducing a novel, universal diagnostic tool. The Mantis, Modular ANtigen-based Test for Infectious diseaseS, is designed to be universal due to its modularity. In this way we aim to introduce a quick ...
With all these new diseases arising, it becomes increasingly more difficult to determine what a patient is suffering from. Especially since new diseases often evolve from existing one, distinguishing between similar diseases has proven to be a challenge in diagnosis. As a consequence, specific treatment for infected individuals is often not possible. Instead, curative methods used come down to treatment with antibiotics based on symptoms displayed by the patient. This highlights the importance of proper diagnosis to prevent faulty treatment. As a solution, the Mantis diagnostic allows for high-specificity diagnosis due to its modular technology.
The Mantis diagnostic can be easily adapted to new diseases due to the synthetic biology approach taken in its design. We make use of novel antibody-like protein called affinity bodies, which can be designed to have high affinity for specific targets. By altering the genetic code of these molecules we create affinity bodies that are specific for disease antigens such as chikungunya virus, Human African Trypanosoma and Mayaro virus. Bacterial strains capable of expressing these affinity bodies are then used to detect specific disease antigens in the blood sample of the patient, resulting in generation of a visual signal. Thereby, we create a modular system that is capable of detecting a wide variety of diseases.
At the foundation of the Mantis diagnostic lies the bacterial system capable of detecting disease antigens in the blood of the patient. These antigens can be bound by the affinity bodies specifically designed for these antigens. By coupling these affinity bodies to the Cpx bacterial receptor system a signal is generated upon antigen binding. Internally, this signal is used to create a visual output by the transcription-less Bimolecular Fluorescence Complementation technology, directly coupled to the receptor system. This results in a fast and reliable way to diagnose whether the patient is healthy or not. Furthermore, we also designed a system that is more robust and able to detect antigens present in very low concentration. This system is built using the same receptor system combined to a novel quorum sensing approach.
In the design of the Mantis diagnostic we took into account the aspects that are essential in the creation of good point-of-care diagnostic. Not only did we aim for a fast, reliable and robust detection system, but we also identified important factors that influence the design of the device, its implementation and safety of the user. For this we reached out to specialists and stakeholders with years of experience in the diagnostic field. Combining all these aspects we created a diagnostic that could be implemented successfully in real-life situations to help diagnose patients in third-world countries.
