Sustainable
Overview
UN Sustainable Development Goals are what we keep in
mind from the very beginning. We have explored four SDGs in our work on
developing a novel depression therapy to help those people who are suffering
from this annoying disease: SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being, SDG 4:
Quality Education, SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth and SDG 9:
Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.
Depression is so common that it has long-term social
and economic
implications, affecting people’s physical and mental health.
For SDG 3, through looking up bibliography and
interviews, we found
shortcomings in the existing depression treatments. Our project about
depression treatment can decrease side effects. We also have carried out a
lot of science popularization activities of depression to help everyone
understand and deal with depression.
For SDG 4, we have designed various education
activities aiming at people of
all ages, including senior school students, university students and the
general public. Education materials including a small game and a popular
science lecture are also designed. What is worth mentioning is that we have
elaborately prepared molecular biology courses for high school students.
Online science popularization and offline practical operation were held,
covering from the prevention and treatment of depression, synthetic biology
to scientific research and development.
For SDG 8, we have written a complete business plan
and have also interacted
with Bluepha and BGI about employment and commercial promotion.
For SDG 9, we established a league for gut
microbiota and build an online
platform. On this platform, you will see not only the introduction, design
and contact information of each team, but also the new findings related to
gut microbiota on the discussion board, which contributes in creating an
inclusive and sustainable community for popular science activities.
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SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being
In this part, our goal is ensuring healthy
lives and promoting well-being for all ages. For patients, suffering
from depression at a long stage will damage their mental health and
well-being, and cause their financial pressure, which is bad for
their development and sustainability. What is worse, according to
our survey, there are many problems with existing antidepressant
treatments on the market, including the bad taste of drugs, pressure
of intaking pills before public and large amounts of drugs which
should be taken at the same time.
Our project aims to develop a more convenient
and effective drug
treatment for depression with fewer side effects. We also have made
an effort to help patients reduce resistance of taking medicine.
On the one hand, it is reported that our probiotic chassis, a strain of Bifidobacterium longum can relieve depression. On the other hand, engineered
bacteria can secrete a antidepressant molecule called SAMe in
the gut to treat depression. What is more, the drug production and
delivery are controlled by an oscillator in order to maintain
appropriate drug concentration in blood and decrease side effects.
Our product can be an excellent supplement for treatment. At the
same time, in order to better relieve the pressure of patients when
taking medicine, we will design the form of medicine into milk tea powder, expecting to give patients a better experience.
SDG 4: Quality Education
1. Science popularization activities
We have carried out a series of depression science popularization activities to help public understand and deal with depression. From high school students to college students, eventually to the whole society, we have conducted a lot of activities. For students with a certain knowledge base, we carried out deep communication with them. On February 20th, 2022, the high school students of Shenyu Education iGEM team came to communicate with us. We helped each other improve the projects, and it was also a good training and promotion for ourselves.
In universities, we held a lecture about synthetic biology and iGEM on the first weekend after the freshmen came to College of Life Science in Wuhan University. We offered as much information as we can impart in a way as detailed as an instruction book. We believed these introductions could help the freshmen know synthetic biology and iGEM well.
We also collaborated with iGEM team from Nanjing Medical University to jointly hold a series of popular science activities with an aim to take this opportunity to popularize the knowledge of mental health as well as synthetic biology to the public.
2. Experiment teaching
In July, high school students entered into our lab and took molecular biology courses that we had elaborately prepared for them, which helped them understand principles of scientific research and develop interests in synthetic biology. And we paid more attention to the mechanism of synthetic biology when giving lectures to them. Education materials including PPTs and videos were designed and prepared.
We taught them to coat plates with bacteria expressing GFP. What amazing pieces of artwork they were! We were deeply impressed by their creativity!
SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth
Considering the future commercialization of our project, we have written a business plan after completing a series of work. Our project participated in the selection of the school's employment guidance center. They believed that we had successfully completed the entrepreneurship survey and market research of our products and objectively evaluated the future development of synthetic biology. What’s more, we have communicated with many companies like Bluepha and BGI, and universities to exchange thoughts about how we will make our projects to be sustainable. We came up with a lot of great ideas during communications.
SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.
1.an online platform about gut microbiota
Aiming to get more ideas from teams which had the similar topics and goals, we decided to build an online platform. On this platform, you will see not only the introduction, design and contact information of each team, but also the new findings related to gut microbiota on the discussion board. On this platform, team members and other users can publish their own problems encountered in the process of wet experiment or modeling, or provide solutions to existing problems, as well as sharing their own experimental experience. The platform is maintained by three teams, including iGEM WHU-China, iGEM NJMU-China, and iGEM HZAU-China.
2. WeChat platform
Meanwhile, we have built an official account on WeChat to push some tweets about the knowledge of depression, mental health care and synthetic biology, also to report the progress of our team work.
