Team:Stanford/Implementation

Proposed Implementation

Questions That Are Answered On This Page:

• Who are our proposed end users?
• How do we envision others using our project?
• How would we implement our project in the real world?
• What are the safety aspects we would need to consider?
• What other challenges do we need to consider?

Our proposed end users are common grapefruit consumers who often take drugs that interact with it, and the most common demographic are geriatric patients. It would allow patients to safely consume their medicine whilst consuming, for some, their favourite fruit. We envision our project to inspire other pursuits of advancing personalized medicine. People have unique medical situations and requirements where cell engineering could be beneficial and unburden them from some of the complications that arise from their medical conditions. In the real world, we would implement our engineered cells as a probiotic supplement that a user could use before consuming grapefruit.

In terms of safety, we do not have an obvious safety risk of consuming our engineered yeast as it already is known to exist in our bodies without posing health risks. When we engineered our cells, we also didn’t substitute nor remove any of the genes that would reduce its original functionalities. Some potential challenges that need to be considered in the future would be the need to consider how much of our engineered yeast cells need to be consumed to have therapeutic effect. We would also need to design a pill, or capsule that could carry the therapeutic content to the desired location of action in our bodies - the small intestine. We will also need to run future tests to understand how well, and for how long the cells are able to colonize the small intestine, and whether a reasonable amount of the therapeutic is consumed to achieve the goals of our creation.

Applications of Citrus Safe

Over the past few years, venture funding for gut microbiome-related companies has ranged from $79M-$289M. Additionally, in 2016, the Obama Administration founded the National Microbiome Initiative to promote research of the gut microbiome and its applications (Srinivas, 2016). The gut microbiome is increasingly being seen and noticed as an important marker for health, longevity, and the maintenance of an individual’s physical and mental wellbeing. As a result, there is much growth in entrepreneurship related to the gut microbiome, with top companies working on creating therapeutics, or designing custom microbes, such as Ginkgo Bioworks (Dixon, Williams, & Pretorius, 2021). An increase in the availability of information surrounding the gut microbiome has also allowed individuals to exert more agency over their gut health, and learn more about the state of their own health.

This information can lead individuals to make choices that can more immediately impact their health and wellbeing, and we view our project as fitting into the intersection of long-term research on the gut microbiome and the increased accessibility for individuals to mitigate their health challenges by taking a more personalized approach to their health, which is more commonly known as the field of personalized medicine. The vision of personalized medicine is to create treatment plans that are a best fit for the patients’ health profile, and that seek to mitigate the variability present in responses to drug treatments. Our proposed end users are individuals who would like to ensure that they mitigate the grapefruit-drug interaction by taking a probiotic that acts as a sort of gut shield that, in the chance that they consume something containing grapefruit, it will not interfere with their medications. To implement our project in the real world, we would like to continue our research, with the end goal of creating a product that would help protect individuals against the consumption of grapefruit. For safety aspects, we would need to consider ranges for metabolic responses for different medications, and incorporate this into our quantification work.