Human Practices Overview
Team:Shenzhen SFLS/HUMAN PRACTICES
Human Practices account for a heavy portion in our team’s work. Since our project involves with Hepatitis C, which is a disease often ignored by the masses, our human practices effort is a comprehensive and international outreach approach, focusing specifically on gaining effective feedbacks from all walks of life and creating a basic science literacy of hepatitis and synthetic facts to the general public. We also discussed the design of our project with experts from hospitals and the Red Cross to improve our test paper so that it could be used by the consumers in an ideal situation. They also were helpful with advice on possible fields to apply our test paper.
Promotion In Book City
On September 25th, SFLS_iGEMers went to Shenzhen Book City to introduce synthetic biology to the citizens and to conduct an online survey. We managed to get a stall inside of the building. In order to demonstrate our project to the citizens, we set up a huge poster beside the stall and successfully attracted lots of people.
Team members stood on both sides of the walkway, delivering brochures of which contents are about some basic information of hepatitis. We gave those who were willing to fill in our questionnaire small badges and bookmarks originally designed by ourselves. When we sent our little gifts to the kids, they smiled happily, which made us happy too. We went around the entire Book city to ask the citizens if they were willing to complete our questionnaire and passed out the brochures.
'The brochure that we designed to introduce HCV was delivered to more than 200 people, though not much people were willing to fill in the questionnaire.
We are lucky to be the ones who introduce important knowledge to the citizens. After our activity, although we all felt tired, we were showered with sense of achievement and fulfillment.
The results are ellaborated in the later "Questionnaire ahout HCV detection" section.
We received more feedback and advice on our project through this activity. Besides, our teammates gained experience on how to communicate with people and how to sell our products to others.
Planting Interest In Youngsters
Our team found that teenagers, with responsibility of adulthood approaching, should be the best group to be educated and inspired by iGEM and our project. Therefore, we held two presentations at junior highs nearby in a roll on June 7th and 8th. Hundreds of students took part in our presentation.
To start off, we gave a brief introduction of iGEM and synthetic biology together with our bonus gifts for answering questions---antibiotic free mediums that were aimed to attract more attentive participation of the audience. And this really worked out! The video recorded before and a short clip we cut from Lucy was used to put forward our topic as well. After that, we laid emphasis on our project description. We felt responsible to let these students realize the serious current situation involving HCV accurately so that he or she and people close to them will be prevented from being infected with the diseases. During the process, we implied role-play into our presentation to make it easier to understand and remember, which also won us warm applause and a hall full of laughter.
After the presentation, some audience huddled up around us and continued to raise lots of inspiring questions about our project and synthetic biology as well. We were so glad to witness the great interest being triggered from the youth and their critical thus creative way of thinking.
To sum up, not only did we gain a valuable experience of spreading our ideas, but also the key to the splendid world of biology has given to our younger alum.
(Figure 1&2: Baihe Foreign Language School Figure 3: Shenzhen Foreign Language School)
Meetup
In the intention of reaching out to other high school teams in China, our team organized a meetup located in our campus on August 1st.
We started sending out invitation in June, and almost all of the high school teams in the Southeast China responded. However, just a week before the meetup, some teams suddenly turned down our invitation, therefore not as much teams showed up as we expected, mainly for financial issues. At last, Team JNFLS_China arrived in time as they promised. Despite lots of difficulties we've been through, the result turned out to be satisfying.
The meeting started with each team drawing a picture illustrating about their experience during iGEM participation. Then, we demonstrated our project one by one. Our team surprisingly found that our project had many similarities with that of Jinan Foreign Languages School. We discussed the possibility of collaborating on our experiment and learned a lot from each other. Even when we were having lunch togther, we talked and had a lively discussion. We were really happy to meet such nice team whose members share same interests with us! In the afternoon, 3 post-doctoral scholars from CSMedLab delivered a very informative speech about transgenic plants and after that, answered our questions patiently.We have gained a lot of knowledge as well as some social skills in this activity. We had a good time together, and through communicating with each others in a relaxing atmosphere we also acquired a lot of useful things.
Questionnarie about HCV Dectection
Fundraising
We released an online questionnaire on September 1st and received 1023 valid answers by the time we closed the website on September 22ed. Our sample of this survey came from all over the country as shown below. It’s worth mentioning that we also received 24 answers coming abroad, which encouraged our teammembers a lot.
We selected some of the questions and will explain how the feedback helped us refine our project.
The results of question2 and question4 indicate that the public only have a vague idea about Hepatitis C. Quite a high percentage of people don’t know what it is, and lots of people thought that HCV can transmit through saliva. The fact of this urged us to pay more efforts to popularize information concerning Hepatitis C to the public. We have learned that antiviral medicines can cure approximately 90% of persons with hepatitis C, but access to diagnosis and treatment is low. This firms our belief that HCV detection should be added into the annual physical examination, and question8 and 9 shows that the public are with us.
According to the result of question5 and 6, though the interviewees are not so familiar with the term “Hepatitis C”, they actually did quite well answering questions about the incubation period and symptoms of Hepatitis C, which is a real comfort to us.
We made significant changes after collecting the data. Question 12, specifically, inspired us to reconsider the places where we can apply our test paper. We refined our product positioning and decided to promote it mainly to the hospital instead of aiming at the household market.
The results of question10 and 11 are particularly instructive. These two questions contraposed the problems we might encounter with while promoting our paper. Those advices people given are of great practical value, and will definitely help making our theory into actual product.
After collecting the data, we did lots of public activities to popularize the idea of Hepatitis C, which will be mentioned later. Based on the result, we improved our project in various aspects, like the design of a quality control area, as we just listed. The SFLS_iGEMers are inspired and encouraged greatly. This is a really satisfying and informative investigation.
Following is a part of outcomes of the qusetionnaire.
2. How well do you know about Hepatitis C? [Multiple choice]
4.How do you think HCV spread? [Can choose more than one answer]
5.Which one do you consider as the most likely situations after infected by HCV? [Multiple choice]
6. How long do you think it takes to show obvious symptoms since infected by HCV? [Multiple choice]
8.Do you think it is necessary to increase the amount of HCV detection when doing blood donation and blood transfusion under the situation of having no vaccine? [Multiple choice]
9.Do you think it’s necessary to add HCV detection into the annual physical examination? [Multiple choice]
10.Which price could you accept for per test? [Multiple choice]
11.What do you think is the biggest challenge while extending our HCV test paper? [More than one answer can be chosen]
12.Where do you think our HCV test paper can apply to? [Multiple choice]
14. We used gingival crevicular fluid as the substrate for the test, so we need to insert a capillary into the gingival to collect substrate. The process is quick but may be painful. Your attitude towards this process is: [Multiple choice]
As high school students, we need to spend much more money than we first expected, so we started fundraising on the website http://www.qschou.com. We initially decided to collect ￥25002, fortunately we have got ￥26613 so far. In the web page, we introduced iGEM to the public. Besides, we described some of the parts of our project, such as the aim. We posted some pictures about our team members when they were doing experiments in the lab as well as conducting human practices. We also appreciated the support of sponsors. :)
Consulting Doctors
Concerning about the practical usage of our project in reality, we continuously referred to four hospitals in Shenzhen city from the beginning of our project to now.
Guangdong Frontier Defence General Hospital
We first went to the Guangdong frontier Defence General Hospital and recorded a video in May 2nd. According to the doctor, we knew that although HCV is a type of infectious disease, just a few concern about it. That’s because the virus can incubate for a long time after the initial infection and keep damaging the liver of the patients. Only when the HCV virus causes enough damage to the body can it be discovered. So we realized that we should raise the public awareness of prevention of HCV.
Doctors also queried the validity of our project, because they doubted that whether the substrate, gingival crevicular fluid, has enough concentrations of the virus. And then we intended to use serum instead of gingival crevicular fluid, and improve the sensitivity of our paper.
From the communication with doctors, we learnt that to test whether a patient is HCV-positive needs a long time, usually for two hours. It means that our paper will obtain the result much faster than the testing technology at present.
The Second People’s Hospital of Shenzhen
On August 27th, SFLS-iGEM went to consult the doctors about our project and conduct a survey on HCV detection. We consulted Xiuqing Liu, the director of laboratory medicine, who introduced us to the current situation of the application of the HCV virus test paper. After the conversation, we knew that our idea of promoting our test paper to the blood bank was unrealistic, for they only examine the blood after they transport it to the blood centre. We also got to know other ways of detecting HCV virus.
After that, we surveyed over 100 medical workers from stomatology department and ICU with the questionnaire. The question included: the current situation of HCV detection, the pros and cons of paper testing, and the public awareness of HCV.
The result indicated the following points:
1. Many patients didn’t receive timely treatment, for common people wouldn’t take HCV examination regularly.
2. All of the current ways of detection has the disadvantages of inconvenience and time-consuming. On the contrary, our paper is quick and convenient, and meets the demand of certain kinds of examination.
Based on this survey, we perfected our project in the following aspects:
1. We started to think about adding a quality control area on our paper in order to insure the status of our device, as the doctors suggested.
2. We reconsidered the possible application of our test paper, and eventually decided to change our targeting market from the common people to the hospitals.
3. We realized that it’s vital to make the HCV more well-known to the public if we really want to promote our test paper. We should also control the price in order to make it more acceptable for the public.
The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital
We went to The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital for a survey in August 28th. Doctor Xing and Docimaster Li entertained us patiently. We consulted about the control line of the test paper, sample taking and evaluation of the outcome. The doctors drew some charts in order to clarify the explanation.
Through the discussion, we acquired the following points:
1.General design of the control area;
2.The use of gingival crevicular fluid has not been standardized, and the HCV RNA in gingival crevicular fluid is much less than that of serum.
Based on these points, we decide to make some changes to our project. We finally decide to use serum as sample, and set different concentration ranges of HCV virus as the parameter of result.
Team Wechat Accout
We also kept the account on Wechat Subscription from the 2015 Shenzhen_SFLS team. Every happening event and works done will be updated and news about iGEM or synthetic biology will be shared on the account. Since there are large amount of people in China who browse through wechat every day, this account is our window to the public.
This is our QR code, scan and subscribe us on wechat!
Patent Application
Despite the fact that thousands of genome is patented over the few decades, the heated debate about gene patenting in legal and ethical fields remains. Concerning about intellectual property matter of our project, our team started consulting about patent acquisition in June. Discussing Mr. Zhao from CSS, we gained knowledge of three types of patent in China and the procedure needed to apply one patent. We planned to begin applying a designing patent for our project as soon as we finish our experimental work. The subsequent figure is a patent certification and a photo of us with Mr.Zhao.
Human Practice in Germany
The refugee crisis in Germany has been especially serious and paper-based virus test can be used in large quantity at the border or when accommodate refugees. And our team leader Hongshen Wang has gone to Germany as an exchange student.Therefore, she conducted some special human practice in Germany !
Dr. Simonis
Our leader have introduced their project to Dr. Simonis. Dr.Simonis mainly works in the area of vaccine injection. Dr. Simonis agrees that the paper-based test can really help the virus test conduct around refugees.The advantage of the test is its speediness and the convenience for both using and transporting. Dr.Simonis thinks that paper-based virus test has a cheerful prospect and suggests that we should focus on the accuracy of our test. Dr.Simonis also suggests”The reuse and reproduce of paper-based test can also be one of your advantages.And they can slash the cost.”
Dr.med. Beda Krieter
Our leader have also introduced their project to Dr.Kieter,a transfusion medicine specialist and the director of the the Red Cross central lab. Dr.Krieter shows interest in the project and asks for several statistics. “Your test paper is very special and is different from the virus test the Red Cross use now.This is a good way for virus testing.”said Dr.Kieter. Dr.Kieter also showed us the lab and introduced the work in the Red Cross lab.
