Team:ETH Zurich/Human Practices
Human Practices
CATE aims to provide a framework for curing a large range of solid cancers. As a medical project, it targets a wide and diverse audience, including patients, doctors and researchers. We thus considered it important to spread the word about our efforts, with a two-fold purpose: disseminating information considering new, innovative therapies; and bringing a range of interesting aspects connected to Synthetic Biology to the public's awareness. Given the ever increasing amount of exciting results produced by SynBio labs around the world, we believe it is vital that the main ideas and methods of the discipline become more well-known and publicly discussed. We have tried to use our project as a model for this.
Engagement
This year, we thus set out to bring synthetic biology closer to people of different knowledge and perspectives:
We pitched our project at the ETH Student Project House, hoping that DIY enthusiasts will feel inspired to enter the world of genetic engineering. After all, custom-made bacteria already have numerous applications in science and technology. The SPH hosts teams of highly interdisciplinary character, which is exactly what is needed to kickstart innovation in genetic engineering.
We travelled to Greece and gave a talk at NTU Athens to Computer Science master students, giving them a bird's-eye view of synthetic biology, and the important role an engineer can play inside an interdisciplinary SynBio team. We highlighted the modelling aspects of our project as an example of data-driven research that involves collaboration among diferrent disciplines.
We collaborated with our departments entrepreneurial club (D-BSSE meets industry) and organized a talk by the CEO of T3Pharma, a company that specialized in bacterial cancer therapy. By presenting our iGEM project side by side with T3Pharma's technology, we demonstrated that bacterial cancer therapy is a well-established field of research, offerring ample oportunity for academic success and business development. After all, a joint effort will be needed to safely bring the technology closer to public use.
Perspectives
Further, we seeked opinions and perspectives from people of diverse backgrounds towards our own project. Through these conversations we learned:
From Dr. Simon Ittig of T3 Pharma how to bring bacterial cancer therapy to patients and what pitfalls we have to be aware of.
From Prof. Dr. Markus Rudin and Dr. Aileen Schröter what possibilities there are to apply biomedical imaging to improve cancer treatment procedures and how to harvest their potential for our project.
From Dr. Christian Britschgi about the role of innovative cancer therapies in the clinical setting and how our system would fit into this larger framework.
From Dr. Sacha Rothschild how immunotherapy is changing the landscape of cancer treatment, the future role of the classical approaches and how to critically assess our own idea.
From Prof. Dr. Darko Polšek about ethical issues and controversies we might face as we develop our project.
The experts' opinions were very helpful in orienting the focus of our efforts, in particular, increasing our emphasis on safety (avoiding side-effects). For a few of us CATE was the first time that we embarked on a medical project; we welcomed the opportunity to read and think about the established bioethical practises of the field. Still, despite the numerous potential causes of concern, all the experts we consulted were encouraging in their remarks. We have gathered their insights in our Integrated Practices page, so that opinions from experts of different backgrounds can be compared and contrasted easily.
