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Achieving sustainability is also one of our goals as we move forward with our project. As we design, enhance, and practice our project, one of our original goals is always have in mind: to move everything we do as close as possible to the SDG, and to achieve sustainable development while working for the benefit of humanity. Among these 17 goals of SDG, we have chosen three of them as our guidelines.

SDG 1: No Poverty

"More than 700 million people still live in extreme poverty on less than USD 1.90 a day. They struggle to fulfill the most basic needs (health, education, access to water and sanitation). Most of them – more than 400 million – live in sub-Saharan Africa. An estimated 71 million additional people around the world will be pushed into extreme poverty due to COVID-19, the first rise in global poverty since 1998.​

Poverty affects developed countries as well. Right now, 30 million children are growing up poor in the world's richest countries.​

Eradicating poverty in all its forms remains one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. While the number of people living in extreme poverty dropped by more than half between 1990 and 2015 – from 1.9 billion to 731 million – too many are still struggling for the most basic human needs.​"

——United Nations

We produce titinase in inexpensive E. coli without complicated chemicals, simply by transferring the modified gene into BL21 for expression and adding nutrients including agar, sodium chloride, etc.Then a certain concentration of arabinose is put in to lyse the cell wall, and after purification, a large amount of chitinase can be obtained.And the raw material for production is easily available and inexpensive, which meets the No Poverty goal.

SDG 3: Good health and Well-being

"Despite great strides in improving people's health in recent years, inequalities in health care access still persist. The COVID-19 pandemic is throwing progress even further off track. More than five million children die before their fifth birthday every year. 16,000 children die each day from preventable diseases such as measles and tuberculosis. Every day, hundreds of women die during pregnancy or from child-birth related complications.​

These deaths can be avoided through prevention and treatment, education, immunization campaigns, and sexual and reproductive healthcare.​

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) make a bold commitment to end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other communicable diseases by 2030. The aim is to achieve universal health coverage, and provide access to safe and affordable medicines and vaccines for all.​​"

——United Nations

Unlike chemicals, our chitinase is biologically active and the optimal conditions are friendly to human body, which can effectively kill fungi and treat fungal skin diseases without affecting other parts of the body, meeting the Good health and Well-being goal.

SDG 6: Clean water and Sanitation

"Access to water, sanitation and hygiene is a human right. Yet billions are still faced with daily challenges accessing even the most basic of services.​

Water scarcity affects more than 40 percent of the world population and is projected to increase with the rise of global temperatures as a result of climate change.​

Globally, 3 in 10 people lack access to safely managed drinking water services. And 6 in 10 people lack access to safely managed sanitation facilities, leaving an estimated 3 billion people without basic handwashing facilities at home, a critical need to prevent infection and contain the spread of COVID-19.

Investments in infrastructure and sanitation facilities; protection and restoration of water-related ecosystems; and hygiene education are among the steps necessary to ensure universal access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030."

——United Nations

We do not involve harmful reagents and heavy metals in the production process, which will not cause water pollution due to discharge and maintain public health.Our chitinase is essentially a protein, which can be degraded and denatured and deactivated quickly, and can be rinsed off directly after use, so chitinase will not cause pollution to the environment.

Fungal skin diseases are not only a burden for individuals to treat, but they also put pressure on national finances.The following charts show statistics on the financial resources invested in fungal skin diseases by country.

As can be seen from the charts above, developing countries invest the most financial resources in the treatment of fungal skin diseases, which is inextricably linked to their economic power and level of medicine. Our team used the cheap and safe BL21 to be able to provide more affordable treatment options, expressing a large amount of cheap titinase.

Many chemicals are used in the production of many chemical drugs that can inhibit the growth of fungi. When terbinafine is synthesized, HCl, NaOH, and KH2PO4 are used, and these chemicals inevitably contaminate the environment. Most of the chemicals are used to kill the fungus by inhibiting its synthesis of ergosterol.But they can also spread to other parts of the body, causing side effects such as nausea, dizziness, headache, and a drop in white blood cell count. The price of chemical drugs also varies, and the good ones are expensive.Itraconazole, for example, even though it also has the same side effects mentioned above. But it has a broader activity, greater resistance to specific fungi, the ability to treat systemic infections and even penetrate the cerebrospinal fluid to successfully treat Cryptococcal meningitis and Coccidioides meningitis, As a result, it is also very expensive, costing patients more than $1,000 if they take it orally twice a day for three months. Discontinuing the drug early increases the risk of fungal regeneration in the body, a burden that is difficult for the average person to bear.

The chitinase produced by our project is an active biological drug.Unlike chemical drugs, chitinase is produced in a much simpler way ,most of it is carried out in E. coli bacteria.Without complicated chemical reactions and without too many by-products and excess reagents, reducing the waste of resources and environmental pollution. The optimum pH of our drug is about 7, without the addition of acids or bases, meaning no skin irritation. And because of the degradable nature of the protein, rinsing off the titinase directly does not pollute the environment.

Chitinase

1.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itraconazole