Team:Stanford/Communication

Education and Communication

Why Education and Communication?

Early on in the course of this project, we learned that there is very little widely accessible information for the general public on the grapefruit-drug interaction and its harmful effects. In America, much of this information on the grapefruit-drug interaction is reserved for healthcare providers and pharmacists (Bushra, Aslam, & Khan, 2011). Our team also discovered that while there is a significant body of literature on the growing field of synthetic biology, very little of it is easily accessible to people who lack significant background knowledge in the field. Therefore, we concluded that information problems related to the grapefruit-drug interaction and synthetic biology are not issues of the information not existing. What we are facing are issues of accessibility. To combat the accessibility of information problems, our team set out to create a multi-pronged education initiative. Our team held a month-long speaker series. We hope that through these initiatives, we were able to educate our local Stanford community more on the grapefruit-drug interaction and synthetic biology. Since these resources we created were also published online, we also hope that our message reaches a larger audience of members of the general public. By publishing the resources online, this increases access to relevant information. To assure that our resources were maximally accessible to as many people as possible, we also designed our resources to be inclusive so that both individuals with and without background experience in synthetic biology may be able to learn from our work.

Stanford iGEM Speaker Series

Speaker Series Introduction

The speaker series we created was the largest component of our educational initiatives. We wanted to ensure that we provided clear, thorough information on a wide range of topics related to our project. We advertised these events widely on Stanford email lists and the iGEM headquarters website. Each event was hosted online through Zoom to allow as many people as possible to join from all over the world. Each webinar consisted of a short presentation by the speaker of the week, followed by a segment of time where audience members were allowed to engage with our speakers and ask questions. Again, to ensure maximum exposure, we posted the recordings of our webinars online. Any of our recordings can be found on the Stanford BIOME YouTube channel for your viewing pleasure.

Speaker Series Installment #1: Stanford iGEM

To kick off the speaker series, our team began by presenting on our project. We covered the theoretical framework of our project, and every team member was given an opportunity to present a part of the project that they had worked on and they felt most equipped to explain to a semi- to non-technical audience. We felt this was an important introduction to our speaker series as a way of introducing our audience to the concepts of synthetic biology, and giving people the opportunity to learn about iGEM and its purpose. For us, iGEM represents the opportunity to ideate and create ideas that we are all passionate about, and build on those ideas in the ways that we see fit. In addition, it gave us the opportunity to spread additional awareness about the grapefruit-drug interaction. While the general population that we presented to isn’t our main target - it’s much more likely that older members of the population will be at risk of the drug interaction - we still feel it is important to inform people, and give them the tools to potentially proceed more wisely in the future with diet and medication.

Speaker Series Installment #2: Dr. David Bailey

Dr. David Bailey is an accomplished Canadian pharmacologist. He was the person who originally discovered the grapefruit-drug interaction. A large portion of his scientific research since his discovery of the grapefruit-drug interaction in the (80s) has been dedicated to advancing our understanding of the grapefruit-drug interaction. On top of his research, he also works with the Canadian government to continuously update the list of drugs that interact with grapefruit juice. We as a team were fortunate to have come across Dr. David Bailey. During the course of our project, he has served as an invaluable mentor. His vast knowledge on the grapefruit-drug interaction informed many key insights of our project. We were overjoyed to have him act as our first outside speaker for our speaker series. During the course of his presentation, Dr. Bailey informed us about the progression of his career as a pharmacologist. He also talked about the fascinating story behind the actual discovery of the grapefruit-interaction. Most importantly, he discussed the mechanisms of the grapefruit-drug interaction in a clear and easily accessible manner.

Speaker Series Installment #3: Dr. Prashanth Srinivasan

Dr. Prashanth Srinivasan is a recent graduate from Stanford University, and a high-level metabolic engineer. We had the fortune of being connected to him by Dr. Drew Endy, our team sponsor, as Prashanth was an incredibly valuable resource in the development of our project. Our plans to manipulate and engineer yeast resonated greatly with his work in optimizing the engineering of yeast cells for the production of medicines and other compounds. His advice and direction was invaluable, and so we invited him to share his expertise and passion for metabolic engineering with the attendees of our speaker series. Over the course of his presentation, Dr. Srinivasan explained his effort to optimize yeast cells more specifically, hoping to commandeer all of the cell’s organelles and arrangement to increase productivity. His products of interests were tropane alkaloids, or TAs, which are globally important products for the production of drugs. However, these drugs are derived from plants, which are difficult to upscale for increased production. Dr. Srinivasan’s interest was in transporting the production of these important compounds to yeast, which is much easier to upscale (requiring an order of magnitude less land area, as well as less water and fertilizer).

Speaker Series Installment #4: Dr. Drew Endy

Dr. Drew Endy is a veteran bioengineer, professor at Stanford University, and one of our team sponsors. We felt it was most fitting for Dr. Endy to close our speaker series to speak on bioengineering as a whole, and give both the team and our attendees the opportunity to benefit from his experiences and his insights into the nature of synthetic biology and its history. The final installment of our speaker series had a different form than the others. Rather than have a presentation followed by follow-up questions, Dr. Endy took questions for the full duration. He spoke to the attendees about what synthetic biology was, how it took shape over the past few decades across universities, and what challenges face the field as a whole and those who wished to engage in it.