Team:ETH Zurich/Human Practices

CATE aims to provide a framework for curing a large range of solid cancers. As a medical project, it targets a wide and diverse audience, including patients, doctors and researchers. We thus considered it important to spread the word about our efforts, with a two-fold purpose: disseminating information considering new, innovative therapies; and bringing a range of interesting aspects connected to Synthetic Biology to the public's awareness. Given the ever increasing amount of exciting results produced by SynBio labs around the world, we believe it is vital that the main ideas and methods of the discipline become more well-known and publicly discussed. We have tried to use our project as a model for this.

This year, we thus set out to bring synthetic biology closer to people of different knowledge and perspectives. Specifically, we:

Gave a talk at the ETH Student Project House to bring synthetic biology to students in different fields of study. [More]
Gave a talk at NTU Athens to students and introduce them to synthetic biology and iGEM. [More]
Collaborated with D-BSSE meets industryto organize a talk by the CEO of T3Pharma at our departement to show the entrepreneurial potential of synthetic biology to scientists from diverse fields. [More]

Further, we seeked opinions and perspectives from people of diverse backgrounds towards our own project. Through these conversations we learned:

From Dr. Simon Ittig of T3 Pharma how to bring bacterial cancer therapy to patients and what pitfalls we have to be aware of. [More]
From Prof. Dr. Markus Rudin and Dr. Aileen Schröter what possibilities there are to apply biomedical imaging to improve cancer treatment procedures and how to harvest their potential for our project. [More]
From Dr. Christian Britschgi about the role of innovative cancer therapies in the clinical setting and how our system would fit into this larger framework. [More]
From medical ethicist Dr. ...