Team:Aalto-Helsinki/HP/Silver
Silver Medal in Human Practices
Our project in a nutshell
Our project is focusing on producing an alternative acne treatment by using an antimicrobial peptide called dermcidin with cellulose-based hydrogel and fruit-derived exfoliation granules. We made a purifying skin exfoliating scrub out of natural and sustainable materials. The product is gentle enough for daily use still effectively removing dead skin cells resulting in a fresh feel. By removing dead skin cells the product prevents clogged pores and allows the antimicrobial peptide to enter inside the pore where the bacteria reside. Dermcidin fights against acne bacteria and gives extra boost to a product that hasn’t been seen in the market before.
Our project Porifi is important because it focuses on a common everyday problem which occurs all around the world. Despite it’s simplicity our purifying product can increase the quality of life of a user by offering an alternative for harsh medicines used for treating acne. Since there is a lot of misconceptions surrounding acne, we also wanted to raise awareness for it and inspire scientist to study the subject more. Acne deserves to be discussed more scientifically since it is still surrounded with fallacies and prejudice about hygiene, diets and habits. We wanted to acknowledge people’s struggles with acne since we know it can have a huge impact on one's self-esteem. The impact of our project surprised us when 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 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.
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 microplastic exfoliation beads that are commonly used in skin care products at the moment. We wanted to create a responsible product concept. Therefore, we experimented on using carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) hydrogel, which we were very satisfied 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 for us for whole design process. The Package is made out of curly birch wood, which naturally has a beautiful texture. The Product name is laser engraved on top of the package and ingredient information can be engraved on the bottom of the package. For mass production a wooden package is most probably too expensive, but for the project we wanted to focus on a beautifully designed piece as well as a concept for a package that can be used after the product has ran out. With a wooden package we are guaranteed to stand out! In the future the package could be a PLL tube or a oated 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.
You can read a more detailed description about our safety measures and risk assesment from our Safety pages.
Product Design
It all started with a Concept. We wanted the project to result in a concrete product, which would be familiar enough to the general public. This helped us to communicate about the possibilities of synthetic biology to the general public in a clear, relatable context.
Acne is a common problem and almost everyone encounters it at some point of their lives. Acne is also often treated with harsh 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 environmentally sustainable. You can read more about our design process from our Applied Design page.
Dialog
A big part of our project was the dialog with patients and professionals. During our project we visited 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 the 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 psychotherapist regarding the subject and interviewed several people about their experiences of acne.
You can read more about dialog from here.
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. There we have also carefully thought through 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 tests, and even have a prototype consisting of hydrogel, preservatives and packaging, just waiting for dermcidin to be added and more testes to be conducted before applying for regulatory approval. We even attended a BioFinland Pitching Competition to present 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 modeling related workshop to the Finnish International Biology Olympiad team, presented our project and iGEM at University of Turku, 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 the Education page.
In order to reach even more people we attended synthetic biology related association's meetings and organised a Sweat challenge in order to educate other iGEMers about the positive effects of sweating and to encourage them to leave the lab for a while and exercise. On top of contacting the newspapers and magazines we were active in social media, especially on Facebook. You can read more from our Media page.
