Team:Stockholm/Team
Our story – founding iGEM Stockholm
Our journey started in January 2015, when 18 students from two universities and 12 countries banded together to combine biomedicine with bioengineering. Right from the start, we knew that if we combined the engineering of KTH Royal Institute of Technology with the biomedicine of the Karolinska Institute, we could do something truly unique. Since then, the power of diversity has been the core of our team.
We found four excellent supervisors, two from each university. At this point, we still had no lab and no money, and iGEM was still an unknown concept in Stockholm. We only knew that we wanted to work on the problem of detecting disease biomarkers at an early stage.
We started raising support. We met with university faculty, incubator advisors, student union officials and company representatives. We pitched iGEM, synthetic biology and our project to students and professors. We held workshops at high schools and got in touch with media to raise awareness of synthetic biology outside academia. Our efforts paid off, and we managed to secure the registration fee from KI and a lab space and equipment from KTH. To bring the team to Boston we kept pitching to companies and university faculty over the summer and also started a fundraising campaign. Our project was also featured on the front page of Karolinska Institutets website!
After securing the lab and registration fee, we could finally start developing the project. In April, we decided to work with protein biomarkers and to use intrinsic bacterial signal cascades for signal amplification. We spent the rest of April and May meeting on evenings and weekends to research different possibilities. Throughout the summer, we adapted the scope to our results and kept evolving the project. Our hypotheses, experiments and parts are described on the rest of this wiki.
From early on we knew that we wanted to collaborate with other teams around the world. During the spring we got in touch with as many teams as we could. Our first partner teams were Uppsala, Aalto-Helsinki and Pasteur Paris. We organized a Nordic meet-up with with Uppsala for 60 students from eight teams, iGEM chairman Randy Rettberg honored us by attending the conference! With Aalto-Helsinki and Pasteur Paris we have discussed the need for digital collaboration platforms for iGEM. Later we got in touch with even more teams. We designed a membrane protein Biobrick with BGU Israel, wrote for the Amoy newsletter, collaborated with Zurich on characterization, sent materials to Freiburg and gave modeling tutorials to CGU Taiwan. Getting to know these teams has been a pleasure and we’re looking forward to meeting even more great teams in Boston!
iGEM Stockholm will be back next year. We've built an organization that will last, and the alumni of this year’s team are determined to make sure that next year’s team will take of with a running start. We have founded an association and have started planning how to headhunt project leaders that will carry the torch. Our year has been an amazing experience. Thanks to everyone that has made this possible!