Our Story

Health related, life entrusted.
SYSU-MEDICINE 2016 has stepped a small step in medicine field.
Gene modified MSCs is expected to become a win in the history of fighting with disease.

Foreword

"Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work." Us Human Practices group has been one of the critical parts of the project since the very beginning. Unlike experiment group, Human Practices concern more about bringing the experimental result to reality application.

We are good at searching different information about our project but out of the lab of all aspects, meeting countless difficulties and absorbing much nutrition to our project. Although what we discover by now is that MSCs therapy cannot replace the regular anti-inflammatory drugs, it shows irreplaceable effect in incurable diseases such as Crohn’s Disease. Our project, gene modified MSCs have higher effectiveness than non-modified ones, hoping it could become a regular medicine in the future that every human being has chance to use in the future. Through HP work, we wish more people would know and accept MSCs therapy that can benefit the patients.

As medical students, we have strong desire to eliminate man' s suffering and enhance man' s health conditions. Our project, gene modified MSCs therapy will be a small but effective step.

Timeline

• Idea sparkling & Meet PI for advice

  After several times of discussion, we finally decided our project on Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs). It is our honor to receive the help from professor XIANG, who finally became our PI. More…
• Understand our future and users

  We interviewed patients and doctors in order to know the effect and their attitude towards MSCs therapy, making us to face the reality and try to solve it. More…
• Standard animal experience and ethics

  To prove the efficiency of our project, we decided to do animal experiment. Before the decision, we interviewed animal experiment experts, professor WANG. More…
• Interview cell therapy experts for advice

  To improve our therapeutic effect, we also had a discussion with professor ZHANG, the chairman of Biological Treatment Center of The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University. More…
• Attend the Cell Therapy Annual Meeting held by Guangdong Medical Association

  In order to understand the background of cell therapy in china, we attended the Academic Conference in which we gained lots of valuable information about laws and legislation as well as product analysis. More…
• Product analysis

  Though our project cannot benefit the patients immediately, we carried out a product analysis for better understanding of our project and to see how far we could go. More…
• Interview DAAN Gene Company

  When our project came to an end, we contacted Mr. SHENG, the chairman of DAAN Gene Company, talking about whether our project is feasible in the future and his attitude towards our project. More…
• Conclusion and Room for improvement

  Though we have done plenty of HP work, we still have much room for improvement. More…

Room for Improvement

Time flies. Several months have past and it is time to end our work on iGEM this year. During the whole procedure of this project, for further understanding of our project, MSCs and our target audiences, we have done a lot of Human Practices work, though it remains a pity that we have not done a great job in some aspects. This summary contains what we think we could do better during the project. You should read this after looking over all our HP work.

1. Interview:
Most of the interviews were done during the Annual meeting, which is a double-edged sword. During the meeting, we can interview experts from different fields about MSCs. Another advantages were that it is even difficult to interview the officers of China government of controversial department generally, but we can ask them significant questions during the Q&A part of their speech. The disadvantages were that the interview time was limited and we have to ask only several important questions.

2. Ethics:
In the part of primate experiment, we should have collect more opinions from the public because most of us are medical students. How we look upon this question may remains deviation comparing to the public.

3. Public Engagement
We set several official account of SYSU-MEDICINE but only one of them we used frequently – Wechat, which can only spread by Chinese. We wrote many interesting easy-understanding articles to introduce MSCs, iGEN and synthetic biology. But they are all in Chinese, we should have translated them and put them on different platforms to benefit more people. We are now fixing it, we are going to share all what we did and how we feel on these platforms.