PARTNERSHIP
During this year’s competition, we have made several encounters with other teams that have driven deep coevolution: to some, we have asked for help, others have reached us for advice, and to others, we have met on meetups. However, the most sustained and singular ecological relationship we developed is the symbiosis with the IISER_TVM team. Not only our work has benefited from this interaction, but also our perspective on our own topic and our own relationships amongst the team.
The nexus: nanovesicles
The first contact with IISER_TVM was not ordinary. In the first months of the competition, we were scrolling through the Slack channels and found a message from IISER_TVM in search of collaboration. When we learned about their project and their topic of interest, we immediately fell in love: it was an instant match. Like us, they find that nanovesicles are promising and attractive leaders in the drug nanocarrier technology. Since their project, an ingenious system to produce Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMVs) of gram-positive bacteria to carry harmless small molecules for the treatment of breast cancer, bears extensive affinity with ours, we decided to work side by side.
Mentoring for the iGEM competition
Apart from the scientific aspects of both projects, other niches were filled in by our relationship. Since this is the first time that any team is created at University of Barcelona to participate in iGEM, we were somehow orphans. In that sense, we have to thank IISER_TVM for “adopting” us, offering their support and mentoring for the competition. They made us realize the importance of other tasks rather than the project experimental development. Furthermore, they have been an inspiration when it comes to organization.
Sharing Prospectives: Proposed Implementation
To fulfill our shared objective of developing a promising technology with nanovesicles for drug delivery, we settled on doing weekly meetings in which to discuss the progress of our respective projects. It soon came clear where we should focus our efforts: the implementation of engineered nanovesicles for drug delivery systems. With that revelation came the scaffold of our relationship, that is to work on the development of the future and outcomes of the projects, and for that, we find in Proposed Implementation the most suitable environment to share and extend our concerns.
Having settled on that, we decided to jointly propose a framework for the implementation of engineered nanovesicles into clinical practice. Since it is an emergent field and we found that only very few attempts have been done to use engineered nanovesicles in therapeutics, we reasoned that sharing our envision of how to implement it would be interesting. For such purpose, we work closely together to envision fundamental questions.
Firstly, we collect the main applications of engineered nanovesicles. We also work in the scale-up for the manufacturing process of the agents, focusing on the legal constraints and the security and safety of the proposed agents. Furthermore, we undertook a comparative study of the market status for drug delivery nanocarriers in both Spain and India, concluding that both markets are receptive to this type of agents (more information in the Proposed Implementation wiki).
Data exchange: Human Practices and modeling
Apart from that, we engaged with other tasks for the iGEM competition. We exchanged our ideas for the Human Practices and also give feedback for the modeling. All in all, we are very happy to have met IISER_TVM. Our interaction has held not only a great impact on our project, but also on a personal level. Thanks again to IISER_TVM for this collaboration that has gone beyond iGEM, to become an actual friendship. See you in Paris!
