Team:UFMG Brazil/Human Practices Overview

Project

Overview

Problem and
Solution

Chassis

Devices and
kill switch

Lab Work

Safety

Notebook

Protocols

Results

Modeling

Practices

Overview

Integrated Human
Practices

Public
Engagement

Synenergene

Overview

Application
Scenarios

Techno-moral

Team

Our Team

Attributions

Collaborations

Sponsors

Human Practices

We began our Policy and Practices by interviewing patients (1), a specialist (2) and a member from a non-governmental organization (3) dedicated to rheumatoid arthritis (RA), to find out the major difficulties and problems faced by RA patients. We concluded that the medicines regimen, with multiple daily doses, and the subsequent side effects are the most frequent complaints from patients.

Taking this into account, our project proposes a local treatment to RA patients, reducing systemic side effects, and which would not require frequent doses. To achieve it, we intend to use the parasite Leishmania as a drug delivery system. However, since we used a pathogen specific to macrophage as a delivery system, we needed to assure public acceptance to the use of an attenuated pathogen as a disease treatment. To deal with this issue, the team conducted a survey in Belo Horizonte (4). After giving more explanation about the project to interviewees, the number of people accepting to use our modified Leishmania as treatment, if it was demonstrated to be safe, increased by 20% and reached 82.5%.

We concluded that it was really important to increase the exchange of information between the general public and the scientific community, allowing both to present future scientific projects and to learn more about the population needs. To address this, UFMG-Brazil iGEM team created the project Ideator. It comprises a series of actions to disclose synthetic biology to the population and to built a communication channel through which society can pose their questions and demands to the scientific community. It was called Ideator (Ideas Incubator) because the team wishes that these actions form the beginning of the development of a real change in how academy and society relates, in a way the general public and the scientific community will mature their ideas together. First of all, the team obtained a public grant to construct an open lab (5) in the University (UFMG) and created an online platform to exchange ideas (initially in a pilot form, as a Facebook page) (6). The initial results seemed very promising, since 1000 people were already reached in the first 2 weeks.

In addition, we created a specific course to discuss example projects with students, to listen to their opinion and to help them to grow their own ideas. This course - Idea Incubator - currently has 16 students (7). Moreover we gave several lectures, courses and workshops (8), public square interventions (9) and media interviews (10).

The team believes that the combination of these proposals will work as a start point to a better communication between the general public and the scientific community in Brazil. In total we estimate that 340,000 people were reached.