Team:WHU-China/Inclusivity
Overview
In this part, we seek for extending synbio to more people. Except our targeted Education (you can see and click here), we also connected professional advisors and created our own ways in lnclusivity. Results are as below.
Professionalism
To make it more professional, we visited Doctor Wang Min in Zhongnan Hospital Of Wuhan University. She provided us with both suggestions to our project and the “Guideline for diagnosis and treatment of acne (the 2019 revised edition). Specialized knowledge promoted professional popularization.
Questionnaires analysis
We conducted a questionnaire survey on the main susceptible population of acne, middle school students aged 13-19, targeting to know what the adolescent are concerned about, which helped foster a correct aesthetic.
A total of 143 questionnaires were collected. It was found that 76.71% of the respondents had only the experience of grade I acne, while only 2.05% had grade III or IV acne. This shows that the severity of acne in most patients is not serious. But among the respondents, 31.51% of the patients had a course of disease for about half a year, 51.37% of the people who had been ill for more than one year. It shows that although most people did not suffer from acne seriously, they had a long time of illness. At present, there is room for improvement in the effectiveness and timeliness of treatment methods.
As for live bacteria products, 93.15% of our respondents know little or no about them, indicating that we still need to carry out many popular science, education and publicity activities to improve the public's understanding on live bacteria drugs and improve the social acceptance of live bacteria drugs before the products are put into market. We have carried out many popular science publicity activities for communities, high schools, universities and society, and conducted a questionnaire survey on whether middle school students accept live fungus acne preparations after a publicity. Among them, 83.56% of the students chose to be more willing or very willing, indicating that our publicity and popular science has achieved certain results.
We also conducted a questionnaire survey of acne preparations which were more familiar to patients. We found that the highest proportion of acne treatment drugs were Erythromycin Ointment (32.19%), Adapalene Gel (15.75%) and vitamin A cream (8.22%). We used this to conduct Boston matrix analysis for these three drugs.
Memes, A Small Game, Stickers and Brochures
In order to attract more attention from the adolescent, we designed some vivid work. For more details, you can click here and find it in "Excellence in another area".
Product transformation
In order to use conveniently for users, we spare no endeavor to find suitable way and finally decide to use the form of cell lyophilized powder. Our work are as below:
Patent protection
During the online communication with Mr. Yang Dajun, chairman of Yasheng pharmaceutical, we were reminded that we must protect the invention patent for our rare idea before the product is introduced to the market. We can choose to apply when there is only idea in the initial stage after the R & D has reached a certain stage and a series of conditions and processes for product production have been determined.
Therefore, every time we communicated with experts and partners, we have kept the details of our experiment process 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. In this process, the team always puts intellectual property protection in the first place to ensure the possibility of future promotion of the 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:
Give play to product advantages and improve public recognition of live bacteria products
In the early stage of the project, after communicating with the market researchers of Humanwell Narita pharmaceutical, we clearly want to give full play to the advantages of our product’s scientific and technological innovation and enter the anti-acne market. However, the public is still unfamiliar with live bacteria drugs. Especially, the live bacteria drugs used on the skin may be more difficult to accept. We also mentioned this problem when communicating with the doctors of Zhongnan Hospital. The doctor's suggestion is that it is very necessary to publicize and popularize science to improve the public's recognition of live bacteria drugs before the products enter the market. At the same time, it also gives us some suggestions on popular science education.
For younger primary school students, we held a popular science lecture on skin bacteria and cleaning in Chagang community; For middle school students who have just started learning biology we have held popular science lectures on acne in many middle schools and a brief introduction to the live bacteria products of our project; In addition to the introduction of popular science and live bacterial drugs, we also introduced the iGEM competition and the basic concepts of synthetic biology.
After exchanging our project with Mr. Yang Dajun, chairman of Yasheng pharmaceutical, he thought that our project design was novel and eye-catching, and looked forward to the process of our follow-up project.
Consideration of administration mode
Acne care products in mainstream markets are mainly cosmetic cream, mist spray, gel, solution, facial cleanser and so on. In our project, since the active ingredients in the product are engineering strains with metabolic activity, we have some special requirements for the final product form:
i) The final product should be in a form that can maintain the activity of our engineering bacteria within a certain storage time.
ii) The form of the final product shall ensure that sufficient nutrition is provided during use, so as to give full play to the metabolic capacity of engineering bacteria.
iii) The form of the final product should be able to resist the pollution of miscellaneous bacteria and ensure the unity of engineering bacteria in the culture environment during use.
Based on the above conditions, we inquired the relevant information, and determined that our bacterial culture will be freeze-dried into freeze-dried powder. This method is to freeze the water contained in the product at low temperature, and then dry it in a vacuum environment, so that the water can be directly sublimated from the solid state to water vapor and removed from the product.
Its advantages are:
i) Freeze drying is carried out at low temperature, and proteins and microorganisms will not denature or lose biological vitality.
ii) When drying at low temperature, the loss of some volatile components in the material is very small.
iii) In the process of freeze-drying, the growth of microorganisms and the action of enzymes cannot be carried out, so the original characterscan be maintained.
iv) After adding water, it dissolves rapidly and completely, and almost immediately restores its original properties.
v) Since drying is carried out under vacuum and there is little oxygen, some easily oxidized substances are protected.
The above advantages better meet our requirements for product form. Therefore, around the form of cell lyophilized powder, we envisage the production and use process of our products:
i) Our culture medium was freeze-dried using a freeze dryer.
ii) Storage and transportation.
iii) The user activates the lyophilized powder (mix the lyophilized powder with the fresh culture medium provided by us, and culture to a certain extent at an appropriate temperature).
iv) Apply to face and use.
v) When we continue to promote this project in the future, we will also measure the activation efficiency and seek to improve the most appropriate activation conditions.
