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However, since we are working with Safety level 1 organisms, the produced product dermcidin can already be found from human skin and cellulose is a natural material, our project can be considered to be relatively safe and the potential harm in a situation of our modified Escherichia coli escaping outside the lab is relatively small and it would be difficult to use it to do harm even on purpose. This does not mean that it would be entirely safe or responsible to free them to the nature since their antibiotic resistance to Kanamycin or Chloramphenicol could spread to other bacteria in nature and cause some trouble in the future. | However, since we are working with Safety level 1 organisms, the produced product dermcidin can already be found from human skin and cellulose is a natural material, our project can be considered to be relatively safe and the potential harm in a situation of our modified Escherichia coli escaping outside the lab is relatively small and it would be difficult to use it to do harm even on purpose. This does not mean that it would be entirely safe or responsible to free them to the nature since their antibiotic resistance to Kanamycin or Chloramphenicol could spread to other bacteria in nature and cause some trouble in the future. | ||
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Revision as of 14:58, 27 October 2017
Our project in a nutshell
Our project is focusing to produce an alternative product solution for acne treatment by using antimicrobial dermcidin, cellulose hydrogel and natural beads. We made purifying skin exfoliating scrub out of natural and sustainable materials. Product can be used daily and together with antimicrobial properties it also gently removes dead and dry skin and gives fresh and clean feeling. By removing dead skin the product prevents the pores from going septic with dead skin and it overall helps healing from the acne. Dermcidin itself fights against acne bacteria and gives extra boost to the product that hasn’t been seen in the market before.
Our project Porifi is important because it focuses in common everyday life problem which is present all around the world. Despite it’s simplicity our purifying product can increase the quality of life by offering an alternative for heavy medicines used in acne treatments. With this project we also wanted to bring acne to the daylight and gather attention for it while also getting other researchers got inspired by it. Acne shouldn’t be so little studied and surrounded with fallacies and prejudice about hygiene, diets and habits. We wanted to give the feeling that people’s struggles with acne are noticed and the problem is taken seriously. The importance of that was surprising also for us but we got plenty of supportive and thankful feedback from the people we interviewed during the project.
Ethics
We are all collectively responsible for the future of our planet. We should therefore carefully consider and weigh choices that are made during all the phases of an iGEM project: ideation, execution and application concept design. This page will elaborate on how we have considered different applied ethics aspects during our project.
However, since we are working with Safety level 1 organisms, the produced product dermcidin can already be found from human skin and cellulose is a natural material, our project can be considered to be relatively safe and the potential harm in a situation of our modified Escherichia coli escaping outside the lab is relatively small and it would be difficult to use it to do harm even on purpose. This does not mean that it would be entirely safe or responsible to free them to the nature since their antibiotic resistance to Kanamycin or Chloramphenicol could spread to other bacteria in nature and cause some trouble in the future.
When designing our project, we wanted the production process and the end product itself to be safe, cheap, environmentally sustainable and most of all to provide something to the user. acne is a problem which affects a large portion of the population and can trigger self-hatred or dislike in individuals who already have a low self-esteem - especially young people. We thought that our peptide may suit well with an application such as this.
You can read more about the ethics of our project from our Ethics page https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Ethics
Environment
It was crystal clear for us that we wanted to make as environmentally friendly product as possible by avoiding all synthetic and oil based materials like micro plastic exfoliation beads that are commonly used in skin care product at the moment. We wanted to create a responsible product concept. Therefore, we experimented on using a carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) hydrogel, which we were very happy with. Cellulose is abundant in Finland, and less and less paper is used throughout the world, so our product is one good use for the wood. Thinning of the forest is a good way to acquire wood without disturbing the growth of the forest. Cellulose is a safe foundation for a product, and it does not pose a threat to humans or the environment!
Also in package design we had several potential material candidates like biodegradable wood based plastic PLL, paper and wood. We decided to go with a wooden packages because we had an idea of wood based product packaged inside wooden package. With wooden package we also represented Finnish nature which was an inspiration in whole design process. Package is made out of curly birch wood, which has beautiful structure and outlook naturally. Product name is laser engraved on top of the package and ingredient information can be engraved on bottom of the package. In actual production process wooden package is most probably too expensive, but now we wanted to focus on a show of piece, an idea of no beautiful package that can be used after the product has run out. With wooden package we will also get more attention. In future the package could be PLL tube or coated paper tube which is easy to recycle or burn.
Safety
Considering our concept and product design, the end product needs to be safe to use on the human skin, on an everyday basis. We are lucky in this regard, as the dermcidin peptide (DCD-1L) we worked with is already present on the human skin. The only thing that needs to be considered is whether abnormally high concentrations of the peptide risk the development of resistance against it. In that case, the body would lose its natural mechanism of defense against acne. One article hypothesizes, however, that it may be much less likely (source?) that resistance develops against this peptide, as the peptide is evolutionarily very recent and resistance would require big changes in the constitution of the bacterial cell wall or membrane.
Compared to antibiotics, which are used to combat far more dangerous diseases, resistance against our peptide does not pose a huge public health risk.
You can read a more detailed description about our safety measures and risk assesment from our Safety pages https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Safety .
Product Design
It all started with a concept https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Concept . We wanted to gather together the whole project with a concrete product, which would be familiar enough to help us communicate about the possibilities of sythetic biology to the public in a clear, non-scary context.
Acne is such a common problem that almost everyone has it at some point of their life or at least know someone with the condition. Acne is also often treated with heavy medicines and antibiotics, which can cause difficult side effects and add to the problem of antibiotic resistance. Therefore we decided to create a new acne product that would be safe to use and ecofriendly. You can read more about our design process from our Applied Design page https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Applied_Design .
Dialog
A big part of our project was dialog with different people and professionals. During our project we visited several several different places to gather knowledge and insights related to our project, which guided our work and especially the application design greatly. In the beginning we attend a couple of fairs and had a meeting with Bayer to narrow down our pool of ideas and later we visited a dermatologist, a wound care unit and a burn unit to find the right application for our Dermcidin molecule. Once we had, strongly based on these visits, decided to focus on acne, we also made an acne survey, met a vlogger, a cosmetologist and a psychoterapist on the subject and interviewed several people about their experiences of acne.
You can read more about dialog from https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Dialog .
Business
As part of the project we made a full business plan and opened our whole entreprenourship journey to the world on our Entreprenourship page https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Entrepreneurship . There we have also carefully thought about several aspects such as consumer preferences and needs, business model and funding, launch, regulatory approval and scale-up. We got almost 200 answers for our survey about acne and acne products which gave us valuable info on our potential customers. We have already done a lot of preliminary testing with our product such as spoilage and viscosity and even have a prototype consisting of hydrogel, preservatives and packaging, just waiting for adding Dermcidin and more testing before applying for regulatory approval. We even attended a BioFinland Pitching Competition to gather more funding for our product Porify.
Education and Public Outreach
We believe that synthetic biology is currently at the state where educating people about it should be one of the main priorities. More often than not the people we talk to had no idea of the consept and had never even heard of iGEM. Therefore, we e.g. gave a lecture and a modelling related workshop to the Finnish International Biology Olympiad team, presented our project and iGEM at University of Turku students, took part in organising EuropaBio’s European Biotech week and played with kids in Finnish Science Centre Heureka while teaching them about synthetic biology with huge biobricks made out of foam. Details of our educational activities can be found from https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Education .
In order to reach even more people we attended synthetic biology related associations meetings https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Associations and organised a sweat challenge in order to educate other iGEMers about the positive effects of sweating and get them to do some exercice to balance all the lab work https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Sweat_Challenge . On top of contacting the traditional media we were active in social media, especially in our Facebook facebook.com/aaltohelsinki . You can read more from our media page https://2017.igem.org/Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Media .
References
[1] Writers, YEAR. Name of article / book. Publication. Accessible at: [url here].
[2] Writers, YEAR. Name of article / book. Publication. Accessible at: [url here].
[3] Writers, YEAR. Name of article / book. Publication. Accessible at: [url here].
[4] Writers, YEAR. Name of article / book. Publication. Accessible at: [url here].
[5] Writers, YEAR. Name of article / book. Publication. Accessible at: [url here].
