Human Practice

Human Practice has always been a crucial part of an IGEM project. In order to establish integrated human practice with enough social engagement, we performed the following tasks.

Gold

Online  Media

At the beginning of the project, we set up a WeChat official account, a form of online media, where our team posted articles that introduce concept and knowledge relating to our project. The official account was run by one team member and articles about introduction of lab safety, team member introduction, and interview with a doctor at Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan, an article about what is colorectal cancer, and an article talks about synthetic biology as well as our team’s project.

*Zhongnan Hospital is a hospital run by Wuhan University. Its whole name is Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University.

Presentations

During our visit in Hangzhou, we did a presentation to students from Yiling Middle School in Zhejiang University. As this is also a part of collaboration, the participated teams talked about different aspects of IGEM competition. Our team focused on the introduction of our project through explaining what is colorectal cancer and mechanism of how microRNA controlling gene expression as well as cell cycle. Later we went to the Zhejiang Science Museum to introduce our project and the competition to the public. We hand out fans with information about colorectal cancer, tell the tourists about the project, and we designed games relating to science for the younger children to play. The process of handing out the fans and talking to tourists involves a lot of social interaction where we get to know about people’s attitude toward cancer related projects.

Survey

To better understand the public opinion, a survey was designed after returning from Hangzhou. The first version was released and received 333 responses. A second modified version was released with changes in the descriptions and choices of the questions so to avoid the equivocation occurred in the first one. The second version is translated into English version as well, and they were posted in the IGEM community as a collaboration request. However, the sample space is unsatisfactory with only 10 responses in total. After all, the survey provided us with information about the public opinion from their knowledge on colorectal cancer to their expectations of the treatments. The survey intended to leave free response in many of the questions to avoid limiting the choice of response, and we did get a few interesting answers on some of the questions, showing different perspective of different people.

There are 3 versions of questionnaires, even though the questions haven’t change much, the consolidation of the result is quite hard since adjustments have been made to the expressions. In sum, among the 342 responses, 47 of them haven’t heard of colorectal cancer before, and among the 218 people who have heard of the disease, only 37 of them have knowledge about it.

Most of them do not have relatives or friends being suffered from it, however still 80 out of 342 reported having this case.

The most painful parts of having a cancer for most responses are the fact that many patients failed to discover their illness at the early stage of tumor development as well as inability to cure or even treat the disease. Other also chose the choice: physical pain brought by the disease.

However, analyzing the part about attitude toward current diagnosis techniques, most people do not have a clear idea about the pros and cons of the techniques along with problems with sample spaces. The Chinese version mainly focuses on the experience and the cost. While the English version focuses on experience and privacy. Sample space from second trial is too small to make solid conclusion while comparing the results in the three surveys, the dominant answer choices are different reflecting certain degree of diversification between different groups of people. If this project wants to fully develop into clinical uses, further surveys on public opinion have to be made and released between different groups of people.

Clearly, accuracy and efficiency is quite prevailing when asked about the future direction of developing techniques of diagnosis.

And most people think that the development in cancer related treatments should be more focused on methods of curing or at least alleviating, the disease and its diagnosis.

 

Interview

At the beginning of our project, we interviewed Doctor Xu at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University. After the interview, we realize that it is essential to improve the current diagnosis and treatments on colorectal cancer. Biomarkers may be a way to improve the techniques. The interview suggested the importance of diagnosing colorectal cancer at its early stage. It was later posted on our team’s WeChat official account.

Later we had another interview with Professor Zhou at Wuhan University, School of Basic Medical Science. The questions are more focused on experiments and technique development instead of clinical implementations like what we talked about in the previous one. She suggested the using of microRNA as a biomarker and told us about its function as a target in cancer treatments. After reading reviews on microRNA and cancer, we decided to focus our project on the application of miRNA-21 as a biomarker.

Professor Zhou provided suggestions on the future direction of microRNA biomarker. She told us that microRNA biomarkers not only serve for the diagnosis of cancer, but also help people to improve the treatments; that is, the marker developed can function in both diagnosis and treatment. Our group was at first focusing on the role of microRNA in diagnosing colorectal cancer, however through the interview we realized that the technique can be always developed as a tool for treatments. We modified the methods, and had a second trial.

Self-improvement

Without realizing the medical ethics protocols behind, we formerly planned to borrow real rejected patients’ tissues from the hospitals, which provide an ideal environment to measure the expression of mir-21 in colorectal cancer patients. However, after the interviews with Professor Zhou and Professor Rui Xu and a careful review of iGEM’s guidelines, we became aware of the challenging, time-assuming and ethical aspects of this plan in light of the complex procedures that we have to complete in order to borrow and perform experiments on human tissue. For this reason, we reformed our plans and instead created environments containing varied concentration of mir-21, which simulated the varying amount of the miRNA in different human bodies and enabled us to better test and observe the potential of mir-21 sponge to be used as cancer detectors in various environments. The interviews also shed lights on the long way to come if we want to use mir-21 sponge in further researches

Visiting to biomedical testing center

At the end our first trial, we visited Kindstar Global, a biomedical testing center, to learn about techniques relating to our projects. The sophisticated machines were fascinating. Moreover, through our visit to the testing center, we were able to get a clearer idea how the merits as well as limitations of the testing and prospect the future of microRNA biomarkers as a tool for testing.

Public Education

In mid July, we visited a local science center and gave short speeches to people pertaining basic information on colorectal cancer, current treatments, and, of course, our approaches to tackle this challenge. In this experience, raising public awareness of colorectal cancer is attempted. At the same time, some team members also scattered and distributed hand fans to people, on which basic information on prevention of the cancer and recommendation of doing regular checks were printed.

Team Wechat Accout

We also kept the account on WeChat Subscription from the 2017 Worldshaper-Wuhan team. Every happening event and works done will be updated and news about iGEM, colorectal cancer or synthetic biology will be shared on the account. Since there are large amount of people in China who browse through WeChat every day, this account is our window to the public.

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