Integrated Human Practice

Introduction

Human practice has been a cornerstone in our iGEM project right from the start. We have spent a great deal of time teaching others about our ideas and methods, which we have been using. We have been able to use the feedback to improve our presentation and get ideas for new future perspectives, as well as avoiding any potential pitfalls. We have also been reaching out to companies and experts in different fields to get a more qualified view on the work we have been doing. The information they gave us have helped us to develop new goals for the future perspectives of our project and to expand our knowledge about the different sub elements. By interviewing all these experts and companies we have gained insight into today's market and we can see that there is a demand for developing solutions, which our sub elements would be good to use for.

Projects

Evaluation from KOLD College

We finished our visit at KOLD college with an evaluation in order to get a better idea of our performance and project idea. They were generally very positive about Bacto-Aid, especially because they already were aware about the problems which antimicrobial resistance poses today. It was rewarding to see, that we are trying to solve an issue, that many people worry about. Some of the comments, which we have integrated in our future presentations of the project were: "There is a lot of potential in these areas" The future potential for the different parts of the project tended to cause a positive response and therefore we added a slideshow exclusively for the potentials of the sub projects. "It lacks focus on problematics” We took this comment into consideration and decided to start the presentation with an explanation of why this area still needs a solution. The feedback we got from KOLD college helped us especially with what was important to focus on in the presentation.

Interviewing a nurse

We interviewed a nurse, Laura Jakobsen, who is working at the plastic surgery department at the University Hospital of Odense (OUH). In Denmark, burn patients are mainly sent to OUH and Rigshospitalet (another major hospital unit in our country). This helped us getting an idea of what kind of issues the hospitals are facing when treating wounds, and what kind of requirements they would have for our Bacto-Aid. At her work, they have encountered, a couple of times now, resistant bacterial infections, which required special care and extra awareness. This confirms the problem of resistance and proving how actual the problem is.

One of the major issues there was with our product, according to Laura Jakobsen, was the suction capacity of the silk. Burn wounds have a tendency to leak a lot the first few days after the incident. This is an important aspect we should look into if our Bacto-Aid should be used for treating burns. Despite this current limitation of our product, she did see a potential for it as a bandage applied after lymph node removal surgery in the inguinal region. It is a particularly problematic healing region due to the constant pressure it is undergoing (a patient has to sit) and due to the serum accumulation. Serum tapping is an important aftercare that has to be done regularly. It consists of removing the serum produced in the limb, which lymph nodes typically would transport away, manually. It is therefore a highway to infections in this region due to the missing lymph nodes (which also is a center for the immune system), regularly breaching the skin (barrier to foreign bacteria), and it is a moist area where many types of bacteria from the normal flora of the skin are present. Bacto-Aid could create a barrier that has antimicrobial effect and help to protect the vulnerable patient to any further complication.

Interviewing Hans Jørgen Kolmos