Our Story

Health related, life entrusted.
SYSU-MEDICINE 2016 has stepped a small step in medical 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 at the very beginning. Unlike experiment group, Human Practices (HP) concern more about bringing the experimental results to real life.

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 had discovered by now was that MSCs therapy could not replace the regular anti-inflammatory drugs, it showed irreplaceable effects on incurable diseases such as Crohn’s Disease. Our project, gene modified MSCs had higher effectiveness than non-modified ones, hoping it could become a regular medicine in the future that every human being will have opportunities to use in the future. Through HP work, we wished more people to know and accept MSC therapy that could 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 PIs for Advice

  After several times of discussion, we finally decided our project on mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). It was our honor to receive help from professor XIANG, who finally became our first PI. More…
• Understand our Future and Users

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

  To prove the efficiency of our project, we decided to do animal experiments. Before that, we interviewed animal experiment experts, Prof. WANG. More…
• Interview Cell Therapy Experts for Advice

  To improve our therapeutic effect, we also had a discussion with Prof. 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 could not benefit the patients immediately, we carried out product analysis for better understanding of our project. More…
• Interview DAAN Gene Company

  When our project came to an end, we contacted Mr. SHENG, the chairman of DAAN Gene Company and talked 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 interviews were done during the annual meeting, which is a double-edged sword. During the meeting, we could interview experts from different fields on MSCs. Another advantage was that even though it was difficult to interview officers of Chinese government, we could ask them significant questions during the Q&A part. The disadvantages was that the interview time was limited and we could only ask several questions.

2. Ethics:
In the part of primate experiments, we should have collected more opinions from the public. How we look upon this question may remain deviation comparing to the public.

3. Public Engagement:
We have registered several official accounts of SYSU-MEDICINE but only one of them we used frequently – Wechat, which can only be spread by Chinese. We wrote many interesting and easy-understanding articles to introduce MSCs, iGEM 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 and going to share all we did and how we feel on these platforms.