Team:USTC/Human Practices

General & Integrated

Overview

     Working in the lab, it is easy to forget the truth that the real world is quite different from the lab and eventually make something impractical. What’s worse, without feedback from the real world, research may get stuck in a terrible deadlock.

     As a team whose intention is to develop a practical method for AD diagnosis in the early stage, we hope our project fit in our life so that more people can be benefitted. To achieve this goal, we need to consider questions beyond the lab: How can we make sure that people know about this method? How can we let people be willing to try our product? How can we gain trust from both doctors and patients? What can we do to let our product survive in the market? Is there anyone who can cooperate with us? Etc. To answer such questions, we need to go out and communicate with people outside.

     As a result, we especially lay stress on the human practice aspect. We contacted the public, doctors, and researchers constantly to receive excellent feedback, and we did learn a lot.

     By communicating with researchers, we gradually learned which ideas are feasible, and determined the direction of our future work， which is the early diagnosis of AD based on aptamer. The enormous suffering that AD brings to society and families, as well as the current embarrassing situation of high costs and poor results of AD testing had been constantly emphasized in our communication with doctors. The suggestions and help from researchers and teachers ensured that our project runs on a reasonable track. The close cooperation with other teams allowed us to maximize our abilities and help each other in our areas of expertise. What’s more, we have also produced a lot of interesting and informative content, which has spread to a wider range through offline activities, networks, and even a course. At last, we don’t want to hurt our planet, so the environmental aspect is also emphasized. We tried our best to make sure that our product has no harm to the environment. Briefly speaking, our project has grown and improved in these processes, and we have used our own efforts to let more people see us and have a positive impact on society.

Experts visits

Liu Qiang

     At the very early stage of our project, all we had were merely passion and the idea of using tau for AD early diagnosis. However, these are far not enough for the final success. So we first consulted professor Liu Q for his opinion. Mr. Liu Qiang is an expert on AD. We met and communicated in USTC. We consulted Mr. Liu Qiang about the current research difficulties of AD and the conventional and cutting-edge detection methods. Then we introduced the Tau-Captamer scheme to the teacher. The teacher fully affirmed it and put forward suggestions to us—We should compare it with the standard ELISA method to highlight our advantages. What’s more, he also recommended us to use the protein containing certain structural domains instead of the whole tau to save money. After this meeting, we determined to take this direction seriously and put most of our efforts into it.

Wang Jiangyun

     We talked with Professor Wang about our project in IBP after our idea became mature. We described our design to Professor Wang and discussed the practicability of the project and the problems we met. He encouraged us to carry on with the project and promised to contact Shenzhen Blood Centre to get blood samples for our further experiment. After we went back to USTC, we stayed in touch with Professor Wang, and he introduced us to Professor Zhang Jingjing, a top-notch expert in the field of aptamer. Under Professor Wang’s arrangement, we also met with experts in Shenzhen Blood Centre and IBP online and get much precious advice about our project. Professor Wang also continued to pay attention to our follow-up work and provide suggestions. His help is of great significance to us. We obtained blood samples for follow-up experiments from him. More importantly, with his help, we have the opportunity to communicate directly with Shenzhen Blood Centre and IBP. Such unimaginable assistance is beyond our own abilities and has a huge impact on our follow-up work.

Liu Haiyan

     When modeling the asymmetric PCR, many of the assumptions failed because the results of the modeling analysis completely did not conform to the experiment. At the same time, there are few references, so it was difficult to judge the influence of the side reaction on the main reaction. Therefore, we consulted Mr. Liu Haiyan about the modeling of asymmetric PCR.
     In the process of this consultation, Mr. Liu Haiyan proposed how to analyze the side reactions of asymmetric PCR. And we also carried out a specific analysis based on the template chain we designed. After the meeting, our team conducted asymmetric PCR modeling based on the assumptions put forward by Teacher Liu, and the results were roughly in line with the experiment.
     In this meeting, it was discovered that the design of the template DNA strand has a crucial influence on the yield of asymmetric PCR reaction, and the reaction time in each round also affects the yield. Moreover, under this hypothesis put forward by Teacher Liu, the correctness of our experiment was successfully verified, and the shortcomings of the experiment were also demonstrated. We made slight changes to this part of the experiment to improve the yield, such as increasing the reaction time of each round of reaction to reduce the occurrence of side reactions. And we will design DNA strands more carefully in future competitions, hoping to minimize the occurrence of side reactions and reduce the cost of experiments in future experiments.

Doctors

We realized that we must get opinions from doctors because they are the ones that face the patients directly. Otherwise, our project will probably end up as a beautiful but useless theory.

     We interviewed Dr.Ming Yu and he introduced to us the existing detection methods of Alzheimer's disease, such as brain CT, and pointed out the problems of these old methods. What’s more, he also recommended us to increase the specificity and sensitivity of our project by detecting Aβ. As a doctor with rich experience in diagnosis and treatment in the clinical front line, Dr. Ming Yu's views on the existing detection technology have important reference value. From his introduction, we truly felt the huge limitations of the current AD detection methods which cost a lot but provide poor results. And that reminded us to continuously work on verifying the sensitivity and reducing the cost of our method.

     After learning about our project, Dr. Qian spoke highly of it. He said that Alzheimer's disease is now causing great harm to patients and their families. And our program could advance the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease. In addition, Dr. Qian also put forward some suggestions on our product marketing. He emphasized that we can have in-depth cooperation with community hospitals to transform the product into a routine physical examination program for the middle-aged and elderly.

     After learning about our project, Dr. Qian spoke highly of it. He said that Alzheimer's disease is now causing great harm to patients and their families. And our program could advance the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease. In addition, Dr. Qian also put forward some suggestions on our product marketing. He emphasized that we can have in-depth cooperation with community hospitals to transform the product into a routine physical examination program for the middle-aged and elderly.Dr. Qian’s opinions provided us with a new idea. Such suggestions are very valuable if we want to give full play to the potential of our project and achieve the goal of benefiting the majority of patients.

     To achieve this, our method should be easy to use, cheap and fast. So we designed a hardware to measure the amount of tau protein in blood in an easier way. No special training is required to operate the device, and we want to make it easier for the public to detect tau in their blood so they can predict and prevent Alzheimer's disease. This hardware is listed in our model part, you can view that page to see how we achieve this. We chose to increase the speed and operability by using this detecting theory and developing this hardware while compromising on the cost (but it is still a lot cheaper compared to existing methods).

     We are looking forward to the day that AD can be easily detected in community hospitals and even your house so that more people can go into action earlier!