Vienna X Leuven
A Partnership from a Variety of Approaches
We first met up with the Leuven team because one of our team members was in Leuven for a week for work, and that provided a great opportunity for us to meet in person and plan to work together that way. We quickly realised that our projects are very different with nothing in common to base a collaboration on. However, instead of being discouraged, we realised that this might have a unique potential. Working on different projects also means we have very different views on things and might be able to see things the other team would have never realised. So we decided to use our differences to our advantage and regularly meet up to discuss our projects and get the chance to have them assessed from a different viewpoint.
Leuven Team: Who are They?
Colorectal cancer is the second most common cancer in the world. Unfortunately, preventive check-ups are still invasive procedures and the commonly used treatments lack specificity and hence have a wide range of side effects. Because of this, IGEM KU Leuven is working on a dose-dependent biosensor that can detect and treat colorectal cancer, providing a non-invasive screening option and a specific treatment in one.
Timeline
Ethics
Since our backgrounds are so different, we figured it would be a good idea to have a brainstorming session together, where we could identify potential ethical concerns about our projects and find solutions for them. These consideration were then included in our group discussion and integrations as part of our human practices work.
Modelling
As our team doesn’t have a lot of background in modelling, iGEM Leuven offered us a hand and gave us a private workshop on “Getting started with Modelling” where they introduced us to different programming languages, what each of their advantages and disadvantages was, and to different approaches on modeling. They helped us out a lot with this, as we could soon after get started on our two models.
Partnership reflection.
"Strength lies in differences, not in similarities” – Stephen Covey
In the beginning, it was quite hard for us to imagine what we could work on together, having such different projects. However, throughout our partnership, we realised it is less about what we have in common, and instead about what differences we have and that there is a certain strength in differences.
The introduction to modelling that iGEM Leuven gave us provided us with the necessary knowledge to start our model; without this partnership making a model would have been much harder for us.