Team:Dundee Schools/HP/Silver
Dundee Schools
Human Practices - Silver
Mercy ships:
In order to find a cheap and effective way of distributing our product, we first spoke to the director of marketing for the charity Mercy Ships (a charity we originally perceived to be a floating hospital that docked at areas where infected people were), Brian Walshe. After speaking to him and discussing our idea we realised this wasn’t going to be an efficient way to distribute our product, as it turned out that in order to keep a barrier between them and infections on land, their ships stay out at sea. This was a minor setback but ultimately a big positive, as talking to him we came across another consideration; could our prevention work and be packaged in such a way that our bacteria could kill Vibrio cholerae and Shigella using RNA interference? This idea eventually led to the idea and development of our spiRNA.
Clinical Microbiologist:
Brian Walshe from Mercy Ships directed us towards looking into infection control, and was able to pass us on to an infection prevention specialist who we presented our project to, along with a consultant in medical microbiology, Rob Porter. They helped us greatly by answering some of our main concerns such as the positive/negative impacts our project could have on communities and whether they would even use something that involves GM bacteria. They were very enthusiastic about our idea and thought it had great potential, saying that the communities we are aiming towards are unlikely to be concerned about GM bacteria, as they wouldn’t have a lot of knowledge on the subject. They also suggested we think about how to contain the bacteria; our answer to this would be to use one of the many killswitch parts available on the iGEM registry of standard parts.
