The UN's Sustainable Development Goals are a necessary call for action by all countries to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. The UN has identified 17 goals that will provide a framework in finding solutions to global problems. The NYU Abu Dhabi iGEM team understands this responsibility to participate in the global conversations to help develop solutions towards meeting the SDGs.Thus, we have outlined four (4) sustainable development goals that we want to focus on for our project that tackles the most common age-related and neurodegenerative disease in the world.
We believe that our project idea meets the UN’s 3rd Sustainable Development Goal [SDG], like a “Good Health and Well Being”. The invention of an early stage Alzheimer’s detection tool, just based on blood samples, will reduce the number of misdiagnosed people. The current detection in the Public Health Sector relies on extremely expensive and risky procedures, so by achieving our aim and realizing our idea, we would achieve universal health coverage around the world, and ease the process of detection of AD, the most common type of dementia [2]. [3.8 Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all]. Moreover, our idea is focused on early stage detection, which is hardly possible today in the health sector [1], so it will [3.d Strengthen the capacity of all countries, in particular developing countries, for early warning, risk reduction and management of national and global health risks].
While working in the project on making the AD diagnostic device, our NYU Abu Dhabi IGEM team, have conducted workshops to a number of students in the developing countries, with the aim to give qualified knowledge about the types of dementia in the world. Apart, from the main topic of the workshop AD, students showed interest in STEM, so we tried to aim goal 4 - “Quality Education”, specifically: [4.6 By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy].
The next goal, which we are facing while launching detection of AD from bloods’ sample is to [10.3 Ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome, including by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies and action in this regard] or simply goal number 10: “Reduced Inequalities”. By making more tools available in the market with less cost, we are trying to equalize peoples’ opportunity for the ability to undergo diagnostic tests or at least make AD diagnostic more available, compared to current diagnostic procedures, which are expensive and dangerous, requiring specialists [3].
The initial idea of the IGEM is to make a collaborative effort in order to solve one or more worldwide issues. Our team, in the process of solving Alzheimer’s disease diagnostics, have collaborated with countries like Slovakia, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, where we have shared ideas, conducted workshops and brainstormed the issue. Briefly we tried to achieve 17th goal of the sustainable development: [17.8 Fully operationalize the technology bank and science, technology and innovation capacity-building mechanism for least developed countries by 2017 and enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology].