Team:UofC Calgary/Human Practices
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 the therapeutic product, or products with novel applications such as space.
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 lifecycle. In order to get answers to these questions, our human practices team did a lot of related research as well as conducted numerous interviews with professionals working in each of these 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 HP gold medal page.
See our human practices highlights on our integrated HP 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 of evaluation radiopharmaceuticals and biotherapeutics. Details about our conversations can be found here.
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
There have always been a disjunct in opinion between the scientific community and the general public on synthetic biology. We tried to tackle this problem in our community by reaching out to individuals spanning all different demographics and educational backgrounds in the public. The activities we planned for our outreach events include hands on activities such as DNA extraction and making a balloon cell, as well as presentation components where we talk about the benefits of synthetic biology as well as what we are doing in the lab. See all of our outreach efforts on our outreach page, or click on a specific event below.
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.
