Hyperuricemia is caused by excessive production and/or excretion of uric acid in the body and can be divided into two categories: primary and secondary hyperuricemia. Compared to primary hyperuricemia, secondary hyperuricemia is more common and is mainly caused by disorders of purine metabolism. Patients can achieve relief and treatment of hyperuricemia by consuming low purine foods and by quitting smoking, alcohol, exercise and weight control.

According to the latest data in the “2021 white book on Hyperuricemia and gout trends in China”, In the last two years, there has been a trend towards a younger and growing number of hyperuricemia and related diseases such as gout in China. This cannot be separated from the progressive increase of occupational stress in the country in recent years. The overall prevalence of Hyperuricemia in China is 13.3%, and nearly 60% are young people aged 18-35.The rejuvenation of the disease is a warning that prevention of hyperuricemia is imminent.

There are two stages of hyperuricemia: symptomatic and asymptomatic. If prevented and treated in the early stages or before the onset of the disease, the disease can be effectively prevented by exercise, diet and medication.

In response to the rising prevalence of hyperuricemia year by year, we have explored and studied it in our human practice. When conducting the survey, we were surprised to find that most of the population would only have a physical examination once in a year. The indicators they usually focus on are blood pressure and blood lipids, and not many people have a very good understanding of blood glucose and uric acid indicators. It made us start to reflect.

After many more surveys and interviews, we found that it was because people did not really have a good understanding of the indicators on these medical reports. As high school students, our medical knowledge may be insufficient, so we had an interview with the doctors of 731 Hospital in Beijing. During the interview, the director of the hospital's surgery department, Dr. Song, introduced us to the two causes of hyperuricemia and the basic situation that men are the main group affected.

In order to further understand the dangers of metabolic diseases and industry classes, we attended a lecture and exchange session by 未知君, a leading synthetic biology technology company in China, on the application of gut microbes in disease treatment. The direction of our research is mainly about hyperucemia, so we discussed with related technicians for uric acid indicators, and researchers believe that by testing uric acid levels and tracking them for a long time, we can indeed achieve the effect of preventing gout hyperuricemia and kidney-related diseases. In the process of sharing ideas, we also learned about the current FDA product requirements and test requirements, and analysed the advantages and disadvantages of some existing health products and medical instruments in the market.

In our initial search stage, most products on the market have the problem of inaccurate detection results, which has aroused our attention. At the beginning of the design, our gene circuit consisted of only two simple parts: promoter and reporter protein. But after listening to the advice from Professor Jie Xu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, we did more experiments and found that this may cause our detection range to be too small.

For hyperuricemia, the criteria are the same for men and women. Therefore commercially available uric acid detectors will, as a rule, have a relatively low threshold, a limit of detection, because the detection interval is constant. When the uric acid in the blood or in the test sample reaches a specific value, the limit of determination is exceeded and then the instrument may fail or fail to display the appropriate data. However, in order to make further improvements, we wanted the uric acid level page to be detectable at too high or too low a level. To address this common product vulnerability, our team installed a cascade amplifier in our genetic loop, which is used to amplify the signal and amplify our detection limits so that low levels of uric acid can be detected, making our uric acid detector safer and more accurate when testing for lower or higher values.

Circuit before upgrading

Upgraded circuit

The reason why we designed our uric acid detector in a non-invasive mode is that we found that most people, regardless of age, male or female, young or old, will be resistant to hearing the words "injections" and "lacerated fingers". Most people of all ages, men and women, young and old, when they hear the words "injection" and "lacerated finger", they will feel resistance in their mind. To some extent, such emotions will prevent people from regularly going for medical checkups, especially for long-term tracking of certain body indicators. Also, for some middle-aged men, they may not think their bodies need long-term checkups, partly because they think going to the hospital for checkups is a costly and laborious task. Therefore, we decided to set the environment for our detector to be used at home.

After deciding on the basic idea of the product, we started a comprehensive market research on the products available in the market. We found that most of the existing uric acid detectors required lacerated fingers and had unstable numbers or mismatched data back and forth due to improper operation. We also made improvements here, hoping to avoid incorrect results due to improper operation or overly complicated operation.

When we conceived the hardware design, we envisioned the instrument to be placed on a household commode. Because it is set on a household toilet, more consideration is needed in terms of hygiene. Therefore, to avoid users from refusing to use our product because of hygiene issues, we placed a deodorant release and a germicidal liquid release on our detector. The purpose of these two components is to help our users to ensure cleanliness during use. At the same time, this can also ensure that they will not be resistant to the odor generated by the bathroom products, but also to make their use of the process more pleasant.

Like all metabolic diseases, the cause of hyperuricemia cannot be separated from poor dietary habits as well as lifestyle habits. This is also related to the UN SDG-Health and wellbeing. According to our survey, the prevalence of hyperuricemia is relatively higher in coastal areas of China than in other parts of the country. This is most likely due to the local dietary habits. However, our team believes that food is not a sin and that human practice is not to make people abandon their love of food, but to improve on their old eating habits. So we launched our Pain Free program, which focuses on people's dietary lifestyles and helps them to gain better lifestyles and habits. For example, our Pain Free Cookbook is a section developed for people with hyperuricemia and obesity, which contains recipes for easy-to-prepare home-cooked dishes that we have designed by incorporating the dietary preferences of the general public. We hope to provide these recipes to promote dietary control for people with hyperuricemia.

When we designed the hardware, we considered many times the real-life problems that could occur and how we could design a product to work for all kinds of people in society. Many products on the market do not have wide applicability due to excessive prerequisites for the audience, and our team has made improvements in this area. Our product design circumvents the gender barrier and age barrier often found in conventional products. The design takes into account a variety of use environments, in addition to the common toilet seat. This device is also suitable for squatting toilets, which are common in Asia.

As a team, we co-organized the Synthetic Biology and Youth Synthetic Biology Science Exchange Conference with Gansu Microbiology Society on July 17, 2022. We were honored to invite Prof. Xiangkai Li from the School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Prof. Wang from Zhejiang University, and Prof. Kevin Couloures from Stanford University to open a lecture on the frontiers of synthetic biology and microbial engineering to a large group of high school students. We plan to let more high school students to experience the charm of synthetic biology up close and have face-to-face online communication with experts from the field of synthetic biology to answer questions through this lecture. During the conference, people shared their understanding of synthetic biology as high school students. Many students raised many forward-looking questions about gene editing, engineering bacteria and other frontier technologies in synthetic biology. For example, about the ethical issues of gene edited babies. In the follow-up feedback, everyone gave very good feedback about the lectures we held.

At the same time, we also hope to popularize our synthetic biology, which is an emerging frontier science field and not well known to the public, especially when it comes to some concepts about gene editing and genetic engineering, many people tend to have some preconceptions and fears that such technologies are more harmful than beneficial. In order to eliminate people's fears about synthetic biology, we posted the process of our experiment on our WeChat. (a large social platform in China) public page and promoted our topic to everyone. Meanwhile, our artwork team made beautiful illustrated books for us. And the illustrated book was distributed to several schools in China in PDF format. We hope that through this way more children can be exposed to this new and interesting field of knowledge of synthetic biology at a younger age. At the same time, we are also making picture books about laboratory biosafety. In the past two years, science-related biosafety issues have become a topic of heated discussion among the general public, and because of this, we hope that by popularizing biosafety and laboratory safety, we can let people know better what scientists and researchers do to ensure the safety of experiments to protect our public and our environment.