Difference between revisions of "Team:Munich/HP/Gold Integrated"

Interview with Dr. Sabine Dittrich

We also had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Sabine Dittrich, who is heading the fever work in FIND's fever, AMR and Outbreak program. Since her general field of work, as well as her personal interest, is improving detection of bacterial pathogens both in human and environmental samples, we were excited to ask for her opinion on our project. She gave us advice on which pathogens should our first prototype target, considering the importance of respiratory pathogens in terms of antibiotics over-prescription. However, a Safety Level 2 lab is required for working with these pathogens and our lab is Safety Level 1. Thus, to meet this criteria, we chose the pathogens based on suggestions of PhD students from Prof. Simmel´s lab. Dr. Dittrich also mentioned, as Dr. Pardee before, that it is very important to keep our device simple and that it would be ideal if it could be stored at room temperature. We achieved that through the lyophilization of our reaction mix in a paperstrip.

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Interview with Prof. Joyce Tait

Prof. Joyce Tait, from the University of Edinburgh and director of the Innogen Institute (UK), also conceded us an interview. She has specialized in innovation-governance-stakeholder interactions in life science and related areas, including cell therapies and regenerative medicine, synthetic biology, pesticides and GM technologies, drug development, stratified and translational medicine and biofuels. She told us that for fighting against the increasing problem of antibiotic resistance, it is very important to have devices for point-of-care diagnosis so that people could test themselves at home or so that farmers could test their animals for common pathogens. These applications are exactly what CascAID aims to offer with its low price and independence from lab infrastructure.

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Interview with Dr. Roberto De La Tour

We contacted via email Dr. De La Tour, a member of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Doctors without Borders, and asking several questions regarding diagnostic devices. Although not acquainted with the field of synthetic biology or the CRISPR/Cas system, he gave us some useful feedback on point-of-care diagnostics. He told us that there is a need for ready-to-use devices with individually sealed one-time-use components, which is exactly how CascAID is designed. In developing countries, running a diagnostic test in such a device should cost less than $1 so that people with no access to a close medical center can benefit from it. Our cost estimation is of $0.85 per test reaction, assuming that we can scale up the production of the parts and use our detector for approximately 1,000 tests.

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Meeting with GE Healthcare

We met with representatives from GE Healthcare to show them our lab and present them our project. Since most of us have a biochemical background, we did not have experience working with paperstrips so we asked them for advice. They gave us useful information which we incorporated into our final design. Namely, we thought on using basic filter paper at the beginning, but they explained us that for our project goals we would have to use cellulose, nitrocellulose or glass-fiber filter paper. They kindly gave us samples from each of those materials to test them. However, we found that the first two show autofluorescence and thus would interfere with our fluorescent readout. For that reason, we did our final experiments on glass-fiber filter paper that now makes up the reaction environment for our readout.