Stony Brooks University, NY is an internationally recognized research institution that is changing the world. Their iGEM 2022 team released a multilingual 50-page feature global journal on interdisciplinary problems that are being tackled by young scientists from iGEM teams all around the world, called “Synthetic biology review”. It is aimed at increasing collaborations and encouraging cross-field expert engagement in tackling problems encompassing different fields and address the needs of several different communities and perspectives to create a wide impact on society. Our team, iGEM IIT Roorkee 2022 added our problem statement of creating accessible HPV detection to this magazine. Our aim being to put into international spotlight the largely unacknowledged yet vital need for a game changer in the prevention of cervical cancer especially in developing and middle to low-income countries by getting the word out on our efforts to create a cost-effective, easy to use, point of care, fast and sensitive diagnostic kit to detect the most oncogenic strain of HPV which is HPV16. Which could facilitate national-level screening programs in countries like India where there’s a dire need for one. As well as touch upon the importance of desensitizing people to have more open conversation about sexual health and hygiene and the crucial role of expert’s interaction with rural populations in spurring up conversations on the same.

Here’s the link to the article:
https://static.igem.wiki/teams/4434/wiki/an-inside-look-at-igem-2022-compressed.pdf

We know awareness about women’s health related concerns have increased by multifolds. This also meant that loads of iGEM teams this year would be targeting women’s health issues. We, therefore contacted various igem teams working on projects related to women’s health. IISER Tirupati. IISER TVM, IISER Thiruvananthapuram and IIT Roorkee decided to collaborate and conducted a Women’s talk series called the We-talk series. A plethora of different interactive sessions were planned out spread over a period of 3 days. The collaborative 3-day event highlighted conversations centered around women’s health issues featuring an informational array of talks, interviews, a panel discussion, and a quiz. IIT Roorkee organized a talk on Cervical Cancer & Breast Cancer by Dr Prerna Lakhwani, Senior Gynaecologic Oncologist, Fortis Hospital, Delhi. She has 20 years of experience in the field. In the talk, Dr. Prerna mentioned cancer statistics to help the audience understand the scale of the issue. She also talked about the signs and symptoms of breast cancer and cervical cancer and the associated risk factors. She talked about the importance of screening and self examination methods. Dr. Prerna emphasized on the importance of getting vaccinated to prevent the disease. The talk ended with loads of questions by the audience and proved to be a great success.

Our team attended the All India iGEM Meet in IISC Bangalore, a regional conference held every year for iGEM teams across India to actively engage with each other and collaborate. An opportunity for us to present an abstract of our project and receive insightful inputs from iGEM ambassadors, field experts, and other iGEM teams, this year too, the conference proved to be an extremely valuable experience. Over the course of the conference, we attended several talks by iGEM ambassadors, synthetic biology experts, people from the teams of important and constructive endeavours like Phoenix, WiSTEM, and EPIC. The line-up truly put a lot of new ideas into perspective for us and left us discussing new opportunities for the weeks that followed. The most relevant sessions for us though were the judging sessions and the round table conferences. Here, we listened to teams from all over India present their iGEM project ideas, and describe how far their research, and experiments had come so far. After our presentation, we had a session of questions and answers with a diverse panel of judges. They praised, and reaffirmed a lot of our ideas, particularly for the Wet-Lab portion of our kit. The judges made a lot of emphasis on the importance and social relevance of our kit and gave us the motivation we needed to really push for the execution of our Proposed Integrated Human Practices. During our poster presentation, the judges referred some extremely useful academic resources in the fields of patient willingness and comfort to seek out certain types of healthcare services and how much effect this has on the spread of diseases. During the round table conference as well, we spoke to field experts about the workflow of our kit. Many of them brought a few things to our notice that we weren’t previously aware of, and have since, worked on to improve our kit. They also pointed out the possibility of error if we aim to make it a test that any user can use on themselves, owing to the number of steps in our kit. Which is why we began talking to engineers about trying to automate most steps using a Microfluidics Device.