Our Story

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

Foreword

"Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work." Human Practices group has been one of the critical parts of the project since the very beginning. Unlike experiment group, Human Practices concerns more about bringing the experimental results to real life.

We were 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 have discovered by now is that MSCs therapy cannot replace the regular anti-inflammatory drugs, it shows irreplaceable effects on incurable diseases such as Crohn’s Disease. Our project, gene modified MSCs have higher effectiveness than non-modified ones, and it could become a regular medicine in the future that every human being has chance to use. Through HP work, we wish more people would know and accept MSCs therapy.

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

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  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 first PI. More…
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  Explore Our Future and Users

  We interviewed patients and doctors in order to know the effect and their attitudes towards MSCs therapy, making us face the reality and try to solve it. More…
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  Standard Animal Experiments and Ethics

  To prove the efficiency of our project, we decided to do animal experiments. 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…
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  Product Analysis

  Though our project cannot benefit the patients immediately, we carried out a product analysis for better understanding our project and learning 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…
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  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 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 interviews were done during the Annual Meeting, which is a double-edged sword. During the meeting, we interviewed experts from different fields on MSCs. Another advantage was that it was even difficult to interview some officers of Chinese government, but we were able to ask them significant questions during the Q&A time. The disadvantages were that the interview time was limited and we had to ask only several important questions.

2. Ethics:
In the part of primate experiment, we should have collected 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 have set several official accounts 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 felt on these platforms.