Virtual Hospital
ATOMS Türkiye team offered a very new approach to synthetic biology this year. It is Virtual Hospital, where synthetic biology meets futuristic medicine. This new approach includes lots of imagination, new diagnosis&treatment methods, future–proof synthetic biology and even collaboration.
To explain what Virtual Hospital is; We all know that today's technology was someone's dream a long time ago, and now it's real. It makes us thinking that, what if all project ideas we elected because of its safety issues could be made in the future easily. it’s a whole another topic that people are okay with radiotherapy and chemotherapy but not getting genetically engineered cells in their body. This idea courages us to imagine more dependently during the project finding process. For example your grandpa wouldn't think of a bacteria which can take a photo, detect an illness or show how many celcius degrees a volcano's crater is. Now this are all real, and it means it is possible for today's synthetic biology solutions to be applied to medicine in a near future. By the way, the message we want to give to all iGEMers -especially Health&Medicine project makers- is, that you are able to feel in creating projects without getting worried of its feasibility or future. This doesn’t mean we’re deleting ethics&safety aspects but thinking more open-mindedly.
After releasing a trailer of Virtual Hospital, we have prepared and released short informing videos in order to explain what kind of ideas could be useful in our futuristic hospital. Then we asked other teams if they want to join us with their projects or other ideas. UCL iGEM Team was interested in, so we turned their project ‘Mind the Gut’ into a Virtual Hospital part. Both UCL and ATOMS iGEM teams enjoyed this collaboration, hopefully we can courage iGEMers to be more dependent while building our future with synthetic biology.