As the saying goes, "Prevention is better than cure." Our team began to think about how to teach the public to prevent S. aureus from the moment we identified the topic, but according to the information we found, most of the target audience were adults, less to carry out S. aureus prevention education for children, in order to make up for the inequality of educational age, we decided to draw a picture book with the goal of educating children, to raise awareness and prevention of S. aureus related diseases among people of young generation.

At the same time, we believe that education should start at a very young age and be borderless. So we collaborated with iGEM Unicamp_Brazil, iGEM ITESO_Guadalajara, iGEM Navarra_BG, iGEM Patras and iGEM CUHK-Hong Kong-SBS ATREUS to translate the picture book into six languages to promote S. aureus' preventive approach to children around the world. As a result, we believe that our topic is quite in line with the concept of SDG 4: Quality Education.

See Education page for detail information.

In the process of making microneedles, we kept thinking about how to commercialize our project and promote it to the world, so we encountered two most critical issues: mass production of microneedles and public acceptance of microneedles. With the current technology, it takes an average of one hour for our team to make a piece of the microneedle. In order to know how the microneedle is mass-produced, we visited Win Coat Corporation. The chairman of Win Coat Corporation Dr. Liu explained and showed their company's production line in detail, letting us have an initial understanding of these devices.

In order to know the public's acceptance of microneedles, we collected 401 responses through a questionnaire survey, one of the questions is: "Have you ever heard of microneedles?" It can be seen that 75.6% of the public do not know about microneedles.

Another question is:” If you have to do the medical treatment, would you prefer using microneedles or traditional subcutaneous injection?” Around 75% of people will apply our microneedles if they have to undergo medical treatment.

Moreover, the other question is:”Would you like to buy the products using microneedles if they can treat skin disease?”Approximately 62% of participants will buy our products if our products are useful.

From the above statistics, it can be seen that the public is willing to accept microneedles, but the premise is to strengthen the promotion of microneedles so that more people can understand this new technology. In addition, if we really want to continue to do microneedle-related research in the future, we will engage in entrepreneurship, bring more job opportunities to more people, and accelerate the innovation of microneedle and AMPs-related industries. It can be seen that our ideas and goals are very close to the point of view of "SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure".

See the Entrepreneurship page for detail information.

At present, the domain treatment of S. aureus skin diseases is antibiotic therapy and subcutaneous injection, but antibiotic therapy has a long treatment cycle and may develop drug resistance, making the treatment more difficult. Our team chose and used antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) because of their good biocompatibility, which means that we have many AMPs in our body, so they can prevent the deterioration of antibiotic resistance. At the same time, it also reduces the problem of antibiotic overuse.

Furthermore, subcutaneous injection is a huge pain for patients. Moreover, from World Health Organization, it is estimated that about 85% of medical waste is harmless, and the remaining 15% contains infectious, toxic, or polluting material including used needles and syringes. Besides, 16 billion injections are administered every year in the world, but part of the needles and syringes aren’t recycled properly. Then, used needles and needle tube waste are the reason for environmental pollution. Therefore, we have developed a new microneedle system that releases our designed antimicrobial peptides to achieve specific detection.

Eliminating the misuse of antibiotics and solving the disposable medical equipment problem is our purpose. In conclusion, we believe that our topic is very much in line with the target of “SDG12: Responsible Consumption and Production”.

SDG is a global long-term sustainable goal, and it cannot be achieved in the short term. Although the iGEM competition is only one year, our team still grasps the time very well. During this year, we will conduct cross-border and cross-domain cooperation with many iGEM teams at home and abroad. Short-term collaboration, such as: jointly promoting synthetic biology, translating picture books, recording podcasts, etc., and establishing a partnership with NYCU_Formosa for long-term collaboration, reaching a global partnership of "SDG 17: Partnership for the Goal" to revive sustainable development, to accelerate our team's overall project, hoping that no one will suffer from Needle phobia and antibiotic overused again.

See the Collaboration page for detail information.