Team:NJU-China/HP/Silver
Activities
I
In the very beginning just after coming up with the idea of losing weight, we tried to figure out people’s attitudes towards being fat. Thanks to the software designed by
SYSU-Software, we successfully recorded what emojis netizens are using when they talk about body weight, obesity or slimming on microblog through the technique of web crawling. By the end of April, a great amount of information had been accurately recorded and specifically analyzed. We found that people tended to use negative emojis when mentioning about their growing weight, while positive emojis when expressing the wishes of regaining slimness. By investigating people’s attitudes in this way, we felt the strong urge and necessity to help people with weight control, and then came our complete project.
II
To better understand people’s expectation of weight-losing therapies, we carried out a questionnaire survey among ordinary people. According to the feedback, 60.85% of our respondents had trouble with controlling weight and longed for slimming down, implying that our project did cater to the need of a large number of people. Moreover, despite the difficulty of persisting, going on a diet and taking exercise were still the best choices to most people, which revealed that there is still plenty room for the improvement of obesity treatments in a long run.
III
In May 2017, we participated in an academic debate competition held in China Pharmaceutical University, which was about the better use of biotherapeutics. And later in August, some members of our team attended the Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC-2017) held in Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. During this meeting, we shared the ideas and experience of our project with other iGEM teams all over China together, learning useful suggestions from each other.
IV
Two months ago, a patient who had suffered from obesity type II diabetes for many years accepted our interview in Nanjing Military General Hospital, helping us to further understand the real situations obesity patients were confronted with.
When talking about the best method of losing weight, the patient gave most credit to the treatment of useful medicine, compared to other ways like diet or exercise. Our interviewee believed it was subcutaneous drugs that helped him reduce about 20 kilograms while battling against Type Ⅱ diabetes in the past few years. And as for the suitable methods of medicine intake, he thought it doesn't matter whether the drugs are oral or injected, valuing medicine efficacy more than other aspects.
When talking about the best method of losing weight, the patient gave most credit to the treatment of useful medicine, compared to other ways like diet or exercise. Our interviewee believed it was subcutaneous drugs that helped him reduce about 20 kilograms while battling against Type Ⅱ diabetes in the past few years. And as for the suitable methods of medicine intake, he thought it doesn't matter whether the drugs are oral or injected, valuing medicine efficacy more than other aspects.
V
Hoping to know more about the prospect of our project, we paid a visit to Nanjing Military General Hospital, a grade III, class-A hospital famous for its service in Nanjing.
In order to further shape our project direction, we interviewed some doctors from the department of endocrinology in Nanjing General Hospital, and obtained their professional opinions on the current situation of obesity. As is known to all, the inventions of most anti-obesity drugs on the market focus mainly on the medicine efficacy and the technology breakthrough, however the acceptance of patients and the side effects are under less consideration. Suggestions from the doctors shed light on the further improvement of our project, which also reminded us of the safety issues that should be well concerned and dealt with when our synthetic biotechnologies encounters clinical medicines inevitably in the near future.
