Team:UCL/Integrated Practices
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INTEGRATED HUMAN PRACTICES
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OVERVIEW
Human practices have formed an integral part of our project. We believe that the safe, optimised and controlled therapies that we have designed can now be successfully integrated into society as a result of our two-way dialogue with the wider world. Not only have we changed the way people think about ageing, but it has also changed the way we think about the problem (see silver and gold pages for more).
Our project initially started off with the optimistic view of having one therapy that would aim to remove the root cause of ageing. However, once we interacted with a variety of people, we realised that we needed to change our approach to a more effective and specialised one. Slowly, we developed an interesting project that tackles ageing through the use of many therapies that all work to increase healthy lifespan of many aspects of the human body. Without the input from the experts, public and everyone else we have interacted with, we would have never created therapies that we believe to increase the healthy human lifespan. Below is an overview of how human practices have integrated into the way we worked and think about ageing, our BioBricks designs and safety.
Biosynthage: Our ever changing approach to healthy ageing
Once we decided that increasing healthy human lifespan was the focus of project, the team really wanted to develop solutions that had a large impact on ageing and which would change the way people age.
Initially, we started to look at therapies that would be an all in one solution that would impact increase the healthy lifespan of all the cells of the body. Senescent cells are cells that are in a state of growth arrest but are still alive cells. There’s increasing evidence that suggests that senescent cells are one of the causes of the ageing of other cells. However, currently there is no synthetic biology solution which removes senescent cells from the body in order to increase healthy lifespan. We were really keen to find ways in which we could create one.
In order to understand senescence, we met with Aubrey de Grey and Maximina, who both agreed that senescent cells are currently a new and less understood path of research. They explained that the link between senescence and ageing of cells is not that clear, and that by removing them we may be causing more harm than good. Therefore, because of the limited time we had to research how we can target ageing through targetting senescent cells, we decided that we wanted to drop this idea. As explained on the gold page, our meetings with the experts have helped us realise that we can increase healthy human lifespan better by having a multi therapeutic route to ageing. We believe that our multi route solutions to ageing will have a better impact to the healthy ageing of cells than just one solution. Therefore, talking to the experts has been really contributing to our design, and we believe now that as we understand the problem better, we can create better therapies that are improved.
Then the next step was to investigate whether the therapies we have suggested are a good idea, whether they would approved by the stakeholders and what we can do after to improve the therapies. Our main aim was also to investigate and embrace the barriers of our project and integrate them into the design. There will always be negative implications and people who don’t agree with the therapies, but how can we work around that? This is partly the reason why we investigated the relationship between synthetic biology and religion, public policy, and law – as these people working in these fields can impact the acceptance of our therapies by the society.
From the whiteboard to wet lab
We have realised through our interactions with the general public, that there is an increasing concern over the safety of our devices. Therefore, we really wanted to ensure that we characterise our devices such that we can provide sufficient evidence that our therapies actually work, and that they would be feasible in the real world. Hence, why Biosynthage wanted to extend our lab work with our lycopene construct such that it can be shown to release lycopene and increase the growth of our bacteria using different methods of oxidative stress. More details of our experiments can be seen here.
Biosynthage made it a priority to integrate feedback from the public and the experts into the workflow of our project such that we provide sufficient evidence of the safety and functionality of out devices.
