Inclusivity
Overview
In this part, we seek for extending the concern for depression to more people. Except our targeted Education , we also connected with professional advisors and created our own ways in lnclusivity. Results are as below.
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Professionalism
To make our project more professional, we visited professor Yu Yi, who is in college of pharmacy of Wuhan University. After listening to the brief introduction of our project, he asked targeted questions about several key points in the project, and answered our questions patiently, carefully and in a simple way. He stressed that we should figure out whether our engineered bacteria had side effects and how to build a model of the gut.
In addition, we also sought the help of professor Gan Fei from the School of Life Sciences. In her opinion, there are many processes to make a real drug against depression: engineered bacteria from the laboratory, preserving and transporting anaerobic bacteria in vitro, avoiding digestion of engineered bacteria in human body, and in the end, making sure that enough SAMe is absorbed by the body and achieving successful treatment of depression.
Due to the communication with professors, we
have got some important inspirations, which were of great help to
the improvement in our project:
1. How to successfully colonize the engineered bacteria in the
intestine is a difficult problem, and the modified engineered
bacteria may have competitive disadvantages.
2. Don't worry too much about the possible lack of substance to
synthesize SAMe. Other bacteria and food in the gut will supply it.
But it should also be considered that SAMe secreted by the
engineered bacteria might be absorbed by other gut microbes.
3. Drug pump is a very good idea. But at the same time a good
oscillator is the key to the success of drug pump. We need good data
support for the experiment.
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Qusetionnaires analysis
We conducted a questionnaire survey among adolescents, the mainly susceptible group of depression, in order to understand adolescents' cognition of depression and of how to regulate their emotions.
A total of 34 questionnaires were collected. The results found that 44.12 percent of respondents suspected they had depression. 58.82% of respondents considered themselves depressed to some extent. This indicates that depression is not far from us.
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A small game--Reach for Happiness
While popularizing our project among students as well as
young children, we found that some of them are easy to be distracted. Therefore,
we designed a small game to raise their interest in our project and have fun at
the same time.
The interface is shown as follows：
We assume that the smallest emoji is a crying face and the player can try his
best to synthesize a smile face. Here is a video which shows the process:
Finally, we get a yellow smile face(like this)!
By promoting this game, we hope that people will be more aware of our project
and enjoy themselves at the same time!
Copy this link: https://daxigua-7g8hxnua3f9ca367-1307495791.tcloudbaseapp.com/
and open it on your mobile phone. Then you can play the game
online. Just have fun!
(Hint: Because the game interface size does not match with the window size of
computer, you had better copy the link to the browser on your mobile phone)
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Product transformation
We spare no endeavor to find a suitable product form and finally decide to use the form of milk tea powder. Our work is as below:
Patent protection
we must protect our ideas before the product
is introduced to the market, which means our products need to be
protected during research and development.
Therefore, every time we communicated with
experts and partners, we
kept the details of our experimental processes as much as possible
to protect our intellectual property rights. In popular science
education and communication with stakeholders, we only introduced
the design concept of the project. It appears that our team always
puts intellectual property protection in the first place to ensure
the possibility of future promotion of our project.
According to the patent law, the application
for invention patent
includes five stages: acceptance, preliminary examination,
publication, actual examination and authorization. The examination
flow chart is as follows:
Consideration of administration mode
Antidepressant products in the mainstream market
mainly include a variety of antidepressant drugs taken regularly, such as
capsules, pills and tablets. In our project, since the effective ingredient
in the product is a metabolically active engineered strain, we have some
special requirements about the final product form:
i) The final product shall be in a form capable of maintaining the activity
of our engineered bacteria for a certain period of time.
ii) The final product should be in a form that resists digestion to ensure
that the engineered bacteria are active before reaching.
Our engineered bacteria solve the problem of
regular medication and reduce
psychological burden of patients. Our project has a lot of practical
significance.
i) Our project can benefit a wide group. Except for patients with
depression, our products can also be used as health care products to benefit
common people
ii) Our probiotics can be used as a platform for drug delivery, which can be
achieved by replacing the downstream gene of enzyme and transport carrier,
making it a very promising drug delivery system.