Difference between revisions of "Team:NJU-China/HP/Silver"

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            <h2>Abstract</h2>
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                      Obesity has become increasingly disturbing and common these years since it gets in the way of people pursuing beauty and health. To improve our project ulteriorly and help people practically, we worked on the publicity of targeted therapeutics and the surveys of people’s attitudes towards various weight-losing methods or efforts. Additionally, we communicated with doctors and patients in person to acquire more information about clinical treatments, hoping to know more about the feasibility of our targeted therapeutics.
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                     The opinion about our work has always been the major concern since we chose our subject. So first off all, after we came to the idea of losing weight, we tried to figure out people’s attitudes towards being fat. Thanks to the SYSU-Software, we got a program to record the emoji they use when netizens talk about body weight, obesity or slimming on microblog. By the end of February, more than fifty thousand information was recorded and analyzed.
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                     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
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SYSU-Software, we successfully recorded the 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 February, 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.
 
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                     To figure out people’s expectations for weight-losing therapy, we designed a research targeting ordinary people. According to the feedback, 60.85% of the respondents are expected to slim down, implying our subject caters to a large number of people. Moreover, though diet and sports are commonly thought to be hard to keep up, they are still the best choices so far, which shows us the vacant in better treatment.                  
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                     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.                  
 
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                   In May 2017, we participated in an academic debate competition held in CPU (China Pharmaceutical University). And during the summer vacation, some members of our team went to Fujian CCIC. We shared our project and our work with each other and took the others’ opinion.                  
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                   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.                
 
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                   A patient suffers from long-term adiposity are interviewed to help us understand the real situation they face.                
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                   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. <br />
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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.              
 
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                  Hoping to know the prospect of our project, a program was made to visit Nanjing Military General Hospital Endocrinology. Thanks to the cooperation of the doctors, we get a full understand of the clinical adiposity therapy there and get different reviews about our work.                
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                  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.  
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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.
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                    Our chassis is HEK293 cell line, from Homo sapiens. It is a very safe type of cell line wildly used in cell research.                 
 
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                    During the experiment, we regularly isolate exosomes from the culture medium of HEK293 cells. Then the exosomes are added to the culture medium of various types of cell lines such as A549, Neuro2A, C2C12 and MCF-7, after which we inject the exosomes into C57BL/6J mice that are commonly used in animal experiments. All of these cell lines are nontoxic and commonly used in scientific research. Our operations are strictly held in biosafety cabinets, and the animal experiments are under the control of our instructor. The ethical board of Nanjing University has approved the experimental procedure.
 
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                    During the seven months of experiment, we choose to use safe gene segments and reagents. All other reagents such as morphine are under strict control of the instructor. In our project, we use a peptide of tpep-lamp 2b fusion protein. Although sounds horrible, the part we use is actually a small sequence of a peptide, which holds none original biological activity and is therefore harmless to human.
 
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                    Generally, our project design has little chance to harm human bodies.
 
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                    All team members participate in lab work and learn biosafety rules in our lab, such as how to use the equipment (e.g., biosafety cabinet). The team members also learn how to deal with the laboratory waste such as cell culture medium and sharp objects. Before entering laboratory, the team members systematically learn how to protect themselves if there is any accident such as gas leaking. During experiments we normally wear rubber gloves and lab coats for protection, and sterilize materials and wastes if necessary. Regarding animal experiments, the chosen team members all have received specific training before experiments and conduct experiments with the help of technicians in our lab.
 
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                    Currently we engineer siRNA-loaded exosomes to treat obesity in animal model. In the future, we expect to isolate fat from patients with adiposity, which can be engineered as cell factory to produce exosomes. Moreover, the exosomes can be engineered to express a tpep-lamp 2b fusion protein (specifically recognize and target fat cells) on the exosomal membrane surface and filled with siRNA of the BCL2. We firstly test the drug’s efficiency and safety in little animals such as mice. Only when the exosomes are guaranteed to be safe and ideally effective can we perform next step experiments in larger animals such as dogs. The further experiments will be performed in primates to ensure its safety. If accomplished, we can expect to realize it on human beings.
 
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Revision as of 18:59, 30 October 2017

HP-silver

Abstract

Obesity has become increasingly disturbing and common these years since it gets in the way of people pursuing beauty and health. To improve our project ulteriorly and help people practically, we worked on the publicity of targeted therapeutics and the surveys of people’s attitudes towards various weight-losing methods or efforts. Additionally, we communicated with doctors and patients in person to acquire more information about clinical treatments, hoping to know more about the feasibility of our targeted therapeutics.

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 the 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 February, 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.

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.

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