Team:UofC Calgary/Human Practices

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Policies and Practices

For any new scientific creation, it is important to imagine how the project will impact existing political, economic, and societal frameworks. This is particularly important for projects that can have far-reaching consequences, such as ones involving cells in a therapeutic product, or products with novel applications such as space travel.

When designing our product, we had many questions of how we can optimize the design to best address the numerous political, manufacturing, economic, as well as end user experience aspects of our product throughout its lifecycle. In order to get answers to these questions, our human practices team did extensive research, as well as conducted numerous interviews with professionals working in related fields. See all the professionals that we have spoken to in order to improve our project design on our Human Practices Silver Medal page.

We've incorporated all of the comments we've obtained from professionals into the design of our product. See how all the feedback has informed our project design on our Human Practices Gold Medal page.

See our human practices highlights on our Integrated Human Practices page.

As part of integration of human practices into our project, we've also considered the process it would take for our drug to go from the lab bench to the market. To such ends, we decided to reach out to Dr. Agnes Klein, who is currently the Director of the Centre for Evaluation of Radiopharmaceuticals and Biotherapeutics at Health Canada.

During our conversation, Dr. Klein made aware to us that there are currently no specific regulations in Canada pertaining to the development and marketization of synbio products. Having specific regulations would be beneficial for both prevention of adverse events as well as streamline the process of synbio drug approval.

We decided to address this gap in current Canadian regulations by writing a policy brief.

Engagement

Click to learn more about our engagement events.

Collaboration

Guanajuato Mexico (GTO_Mexico)

We collaborated with the Guanajuato Mexico team in developing a curriculum as an introduction to synthetic biology for university students. This curriculum covered the basics of biology, synthetic biology and applications. Specifically, we designed a lesson plan on the ethics of synthetic biology followed by a debate on the justification of using synthetic biology in a real case study.

Rice University

We contributed to the Humans of Syn Bio Project by adding stories from members of our team about how they became involved with iGEM.

UrbanTundra_Edmonton

This year the UrbanTunda_Edmonton team also worked on a space-related project. They developed an automated prototype for ClO₄ extraction, its conversion to rocket fuel, and its genetically engineered biodegradation to oxygen. We helped the high school team by connecting them with our contacts within the Canadian Space Agency to answer some of their questions.

MindFuel & aGEM

We hosted and helped organize the Alberta iGEM (aGEM) competition in collaboration with MindFuel and GeekStarter. This competition helped to prepare the Alberta teams for the international iGEM competition by mimicking the presentation layout expected at Jamboree and meeting with well-known iGEM judges such as Megan Palmer and Todd Kuiken.

Click to learn more about our collaborations.

Safety

Safety is very important to any product of science; as such, we take safety very seriously in our lab. See our safety practices as well as the safety considerations for our project on our Safety page.