Our thoughts
Science is at the service of mankind. Problems come from reality, solutions work in reality. Only by grasping the full, accurate and timely information, can we grasp the core direction, and only by facing the problems truthfully, can we find the best solution.
Why do we choose probiotics?
we learned from the contact with our instructors that “compliance” means the behaviors of the patient in accordance with the doctors' instructions. “Minimum effective dose” refers to the smallest dose of pharmacological action. If the actual dose is less than that, the drug will have no effect. In the course of the doctor's medication, there are often non-compliance events, which will make the concentration of some drugs below the minimum effective dose, they will lose the effect, leading to the delay of treatment progress. It may cause serious consequences. However, with the more and more widespread application of probiotics, we can overcome this problem to some extent. Even if a patient does not follow the doctor's instructions, the probiotics in the gut can continue to work and produce therapeutic substances that do not last as short as regular drugs.
For Users
Simple Surveys
In the process of human practice, we conducted two simple questionnaires (‘college students' healthy lifestyle survey’ responses received 165 feedbacks , ‘understanding cardiovascular disease’ received 113 feedbacks). In the first questionnaire, we found that the angina pectoris, sudden acceleration of heart or breathing difficulties appeared in the half of the students, and few students are in this situation often. In the "Understanding degree of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases" questionnaire, the age composition of the survey was mainly under 20 years old (30.09%) and over 60 years old (46.02%). We found that more than half of the people had little or no understanding of cardiovascular diseases (59.95%). So we will intensify our educational activities about this topic. At the same time, we found that there are some concerns about the price, safety and efficacy of probiotics, which has become our next focus point.
Intestinal Information Expert
We interviewed Chunhui Gao, who used to be the academic department of the Rexinchang Research Institute (a domestic intestinal academic and business information exchange platform). He suggested that we could use Bacillus subtilis as the chassis and he thought that our design can be further simplified. Considering that Bacillus subtilis cannot colonize the human body for a long time and the operations are complicated, we finally decided to keep the original plan. He also shared with us the "2022 Global Probiotics Production-University-Research Development Trends White Paper"[1]. The white paper has given our project significant help, and the professional research data from institutions is more authoritative. Under our consideration, we decided to use it to replace our original questionnaire results with a smaller sample size. Teacher Gao affirmed our project and encouraged us to look at probiotics from a developmental perspective and to have the courage to try and innovate.
In the "Probiotics White Paper" given by Mr. Gao Chunhui, we found that among probiotic dietary supplements, capsules, chewable tablets/lozenges and solid beverages/granules are the most popular product forms, which are easy to be absorbed, easy to be taken and portable. The main reason for consumers to choose product form is that the core appeal of consumers is product efficacy. The first three factors to be considered in purchasing are good product effects, professional knowledge recommendation, and professional probiotic brands. "2022 Global Probiotic Industry-University-Research Development Trend White Paper" gives some market direction information, which is very important to us.
Business plan's consult
For further business in the future, we begin to think about the business plan. We consult our team's old teammate, Jiani Hu, about the business plan. The most importance part she told us about the business is that we must learn more intestinal knowledge and medical knowledge, especially the intestinal knowledge. Because when the probiotic come into human body, we may face a ton of questions. We then form the idea of making a intestinal platform to unit other iGEM teams holding intestinal project facing the same questions. You can see more details in: https://2022.igem.wiki/hzau-china/communication
Professors
Enzyme engineering professor Mingshun Li Since we need to use nattokinase in our project, we encountered some problems in the experiment, so we communicated with Professor Mingshun Li, an expert in enzyme engineering. He suggested adding hydrophilic protein before or after the nattokinase gene to increase the solubility of nattokinase. He also mentioned that the overexpression of nattokinase may form inclusion bodies and affect the secretion progress. Following his suggestion, we chose to improve our experiments by reducing the expression of nattokinase.
Thrombolysis Expert
Dr. Sun Aijiao is a consultant expert of STEMI thrombolysis in Anhui Province, China and deputy director of the Department of cardiology at Anqing Municipal Hospital. We consulted Dr. Sun Aijiao frequently during the process of our project.
In every conversation, she gave us detailed information about thrombosis. She also made a lot of suggestions for us, suggesting that we should pay more attention to the toxicity of the breakdown products, so as not to cause more damage. We then searched and decided on the final degradation pathway.
