Team:Czech Republic/Practices

Human Practice

Outreach strategy

The IOD band presents a new approach to diagnostics and diagnostic engineering. So at Team Czech Republic we addressed engineers and medical experts to discuss the application and the novel engineering approach. In addition, Czech Republic teamed up with Chalmers Gothenburg to conduct a multinational survey on the public perception of Synthetic Biology.

Engineering

Czech Republic IODLecture.png Since a lot of ideas behind IODs were built on the fundamentals of classical engineering, we wanted to present the concept of our project (from an engineering point-of-view) to young engineers and receive their feedback. We presented our project and synthetic biology in general at a lecture of the Introduction to Cybernetics class led by Prof. Ing. Miloš Schlegel CSc. After giving a 30 min lecture about synthetic biology, we introduced our project. The response was surprisingly positive. Not only we were asked several to-the-point questions, but some of the students even showed a deeper interest in synthetic biology and individually contacted us later.


Key outputs

Since most of us are not only Synthetic Biologists but also students of Cybernetics, the engineering point of view strongly influenced our project design.

Our engineering experience in modeling, system design, and control was perceptible in all sections of the IOD development.

Most engineers are eager to see the immediate reaction of the system. Following the lectures such as the one for young engineers, we designed IODs as a fast diagnostic test. Also, the preliminary process is quick thanks to the clone-free preparation of required IODs.

Questions we received during the lecture from students and teachers concerning current cancer diagnostics, their price, and efficiency were afterwards discussed with cancer specialists in the interview.


Read more about the lecture...


Medicine

Czech Republic Interview introduction.png In order to get a professional opinion on our project and to learn more about cancer and CTCs, we conducted an interview with two cancer specialists, Mgr. Pavel Pitule, Ph.D. and Mgr. Pavel Ostašov, Ph.D. The interview took place at the Biomedical Center of Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen. After introducing our project idea we discussed some particularly interesting points. This interview was not only helpful and enriching but also led to an agreement to collaborate with the Laboratory of Tumor Biology in the near future.

Key outputs

Use a change of color instead of the agglutination as an indicator of CTCs' presence

As a result, a group of experiments from module 2 was changed to use GFP as an indicator of successful communication between IODs. The use of color indication in the further research proved advantageous (at least partially), and the use of color indicators will always be considered in later experiments.


A recommendation to test the agglutination on a slide

As a result, since we have the possibility to perform our experiments in microfluidics, we considered sticking to this advice and used microfluidics in our agglutination experiments.

Read the interview...

Interview

Mgr. Pavel Pitule Ph.D.

Mgr. Pavel Pitule, Ph.D. is a junior researcher at the Biomedical Center at the Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen. He is the research group leader of the Laboratory of Tumor Biology.

Interview

Mgr. Pavel Ostašov Ph.D.

Mgr. Pavel Ostašov, Ph.D. is a researcher at the Biomedical Center at the Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen. He is a member of the Laboratory of Tumor Biology.

Multinational general public vs. biologists GMO survey

Team Chalmers Gothenburg offered us to participate in their GMO survey. We asked 63 biologists and 50 respondents from general public to fill in the survey. Same thing was done in Sweden. Thanks to that we have the opportunity to compare GMO knowledge in Sweden and Czech Republic. Big thanks belongs to team Chalmers Gothenburg for statistical evaluation of all data.

Key outputs

The possitive attitude and further interest of many respondents really delighted us.

However the difference in opinions between biologists and general public is disturbing althought anticipated. On that account we are going to arrange more lectures about synthetic biology on our university and also for general public in Czech Republic.

Read more about the survey...

Safety

We did not only wholeheartedly followed standard lab safety techniques and complied with the national GMO laboratory regulations but also considered the broader safety assumptions of our technology. We discussed our idea with non-biological specialists as well as experts, which enabled us to improve the design and get a better grasp of the notion our project idea transmits.

Read more...