Team:McMasterU/HP/Gold Integrated

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Gold Medal and Integrated Human Practices

The expansion of mGEM’s Human Practices team this year allowed us the resources to integrate discussions of safety and responsibility throughout our entire project timeline. We began a handful of new initiatives, with the goal of blurring the lines between subteams and their associated fields of knowledge. Our pursuit of Integrated Human Practices extended to providing communication pathways and collaboration techniques for all subteams, including Wet Lab, Dry Lab, and Outreach. Below, we will detail some of these initiatives, their successes, and improvements for the coming years.

Brainstorming

Our Human Practices integration began at the brainstorming level with inter-subteam, group-based investigations into possible project directions. Small groups of paired Wet Lab and Human Practices members chose to tackle a wide range of engaging topics. The groups researched their potential lab projects, associated ethical and safety considerations, and the capacity for local community engagement. Some topics of note were:

• Employing natural mechanisms found in tardigrades to preserve blood platelets
• Synthesizing a cost-effective and multi-use antidote to snake venom
• Creating a publicly-accessible diagnostic tool for Lyme disease after contact with ticks

The aim of this brainstorming approach was to familiarize different subteams with their colleagues’ responsibilities and research considerations, with the goal of selecting a project which would spark enthusiastic learning from all fields. The initial, brief research period ended with presentations where each group summarized their findings, and pitched the project as a feasible direction for mGEM 2017. The experience was highly rewarding as an inter-subteam icebreaker – we established a positive dynamic between research teams that provoked continuous collaboration throughout the season. mGEM had never used this type of inter-subteam brainstorming before, and we will no doubt continue with this method in the coming years.

The Standard

After deciding our general project direction, the Human Practices team sought to supplement the Wet Lab with the current statistics and diagnostic methods for antimicrobial-resistant strains of C. difficile. We compiled a document detailing the current standard for C. difficile diagnosis and treatment, including the timeline for clinical testing, costs associated with brand-name assays, and experts’ concerns about the treatment process. This “standard” document helped to anchor the Wet Lab team in the current discovery climate, and revealed gaps (including efficiency and cost-effectiveness) in bacterial detection which our project had the potential to fill.
Organizations we referenced to construct the "standard" included:

• Public Health Ontario
• EUCAST (The European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing)
• SMDM (Society for Medical Decision Making)
• The American College of Gastroenterology

You can find our “standard” document here.

The Tri-Research Team Strategy

In pursuit of effective inter-subteam communication, mGEM implemented weekly meetings where the three research subteams – Wet Lab, Dry Lab, and Human Practices – could present their progress and receive feedback from one-another. These “Tri-Research Team” meetings facilitated invaluable dialogue within mGEM’s open learning environment, with particular benefit to Human Practices and Wet Lab integration. The lab-based teams could teach those without lab skills their procedures and results, and the Human Practices team could challenge them to discuss how their results may shape the potential for their work as a future, theoretical product.
An example of this collaboration came with a report one week that the Wet Lab’s Typhoon, the machine which measured the fluorescence of our assays, had broken. There were no alternatives to provide imaging of the same caliber, and machines are uncommon even in university laboratories. From an article we wrote about the incident:

“Though it sent our imaging plans to a grinding halt, this incident also gave us food for thought. We ruminated over the implications of not being able to access costly scanners in order to detect and research bacteria and microbes. Being at a foremost university in Canada, we were fortunate to have access to Typhoons – but what of places elsewhere? What would our project look like with less equipment, less funding, less everything?”

Thus, the research subteams began a dialogue on the accessibility of duplicating our work. We realized that, if our theoretical end goal was to create a widely-used rapid diagnostic tool, then we should strive to use accessible machinery in our process. From this discussion, the Wet Lab team investigated the possibility of using a UV light box instead of the Typhoon to image their experiments' fluorescence. The Dry Lab team also explored a method of measuring fluorescence by combining Adobe Photoshop overlays on the image. We concluded during the next few Tri-Research meetings that the Typhoon would give us the best results in our proof-of-concept experiments, but that it was possible to adapt our final product for use with more accessible imaging technologies.

Interdisciplinary Interviews

Although the Human Practices team primarily organized and reported on our interviews (which are detailed on our main Human Practices page), the execution of these meetings included all subteams. When possible, we sent at least one Wet Lab and Outreach member along with Human Practices members to conduct the interviews, since our interviewees often had interdisciplinary backgrounds themselves.

For example, Dr. Marc Ouellette has experience both as a microbiology researcher and as a director within the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); so when we interviewed him, we were sure to balance the team between Wet Lab and Human Practices members. Dr. Ouellette first justified the issue of antimicrobial resistance in Canada, including specific details about where he thought gaps in the diagnostic process of antimicrobial-resistant strains of C. difficile occurred. The Wet Lab members then had the opportunity to ask him where mGEM’s project could bridge those gaps. We received specific advice on targeting a bacterial cell’s crude extracellular mixture to improve the effectiveness of our DNAzyme. By establishing the Human Practices component of antimicrobial resistance first, the Wet Lab members could then guide a conversation about how their project could be changed to better address the needs of end-users.

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