Difference between revisions of "Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Story"

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Story

It was clear from the very first group meeting we had as Aalto-Helsinki team we wanted to make a difference and solve big global problems. Maybe we were a bit humble in front of the possibilities we had but we were brave. We had many ideation meetings and had many brilliant ideas, concepts and things to solve, but every time we ended up with one particular problem – Antimicrobial resistance caused by too often used antibiotics. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest challenges of today. We were wondering could we somehow solve even tiny part of this global problem and how. We started by going through many research papers and projects already done in iGEM and research groups. And then suddenly we found one interesting paper and were introduced with dermcidin, a peptide that exist inside human body and sweat. A peptide with antimicrobial features and strength to fight against some specific bacteria. A peptide which has been in front of our eyes all the time, in our hands, arms, armpits, foreheads while we were stressing and sweating with the ideation and brainstorming.

As a healthy group of people we all thought that sweating is good and if by sweating we could fight against harmful bacteria, it must be great start for iGEM project, so we were thrilled with the dermcidin and started to work with that. We learned it has some great features to be resistant against some of the most common hospital bacteria and also against bacteria causing acne. These both baths were calling us and we had lots of ideas and meetings regarding both of them.

In hospitals it could be used for wound care as a dressing, bandage or other kind of purifying treatment. We even designed special cellulose binding domain and added it into our e-coli plasmid where we were growing our dermcidin, to be able to create really strong link between it and cellulose material used in dressings. We interviewed many specialists, doctors, patients and even medical companies and started to design the application for wound care, something was bothering us. We knew the potential of our idea of application and we knew there would be space in a market for it, but it didn’t feel correct. We realized we couldn’t touch that many people with this topic and tell them about possibilities synthetic biology. Our need and desire for real conversation with all kinds of people turned out to be more important than promising hospital environment so we ended up doing what you never should do in the middle of the project – we changed our direction. Synthetic biology is poorly known among normal people in Finland. Most of us know something about GMO, mainly something very negative, but it doesn’t matter who you ask outside of the field of biology, almost no one is able to talk about synthetic biology. So with our application design we wanted to focus on something that normal people can easily identify themselves with, common illness that 80-90% of the world population is suffering at some point in their lives, acne.

That made a difference. It was surprising how easy it was to collect stories from people who have had acne and experts who have been working with the topic. In one week we got over 100 responses to our acne survey. In the end we got over 200 responses. And to be clear, in Finland that rarely happens. It was touching how openly people shared their stories and struggles with acne and how in so many levels it affects people’s lives such a long time. We were also frustrated while talking with dermatologist who told us there is not really research done around acne in a past 30 years. Not even it is so common all around the world. We found so many rumors, poor self-treatment advices, stories about horrible side effects caused by strong medicines and all kinds of fallacies about acne so we got really interested about it. We got the feeling we are working with something that matters. We were encouraged because of the stories of the people and decided to create a concept of antimicrobial skin care product that could possibly be an alternative for caring acne with antibiotics or other really strong medicines. The only purpose of this concept is not to wrap our research and work done in a lab together but also spread the word about acne, synthetic biology and the possibilities of it.