Team:Cairo Egypt/Practices

Human Practices

At iGEM Cairo, we care about humans just as much as we care about bacteria! Therefore, we have started initiatives to educate and interact with our community and its beloved members through our outreach programs.

1- Breast cancer foundation of Egypt

Breast cancer forms 38.8%of all reported tumors in Egyptian females (Cancer Incidence in Egypt: Results of the National Population-Based Cancer Registry Program) which is a shocking percentage and it has come to our attention that due to the high illiteracy rates and terrible health care, breast cancer might go undetected. So we felt responsible about doing something about it.. and who’s a better entity to partner with than the breast cancer foundation of Egypt? The Breast Cancer Foundation of Egypt is a non-profit organization for over 10 years, BCFE has been providing a high level of care and diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation services for women from different social and economic strata around Egypt. BCFE has also been promoting early detection guidelines. After heading to their HQ and talking to them about our project, they agreed to our team members participating in their awareness campaign and were extremely warm and welcoming.

2- Children’s University- Cairo University

Children’s university is a nation-wide project and the programme we collaborated with specifically has been designed by the faculty of Science, Cairo University and is a program especially designed to introduce different science departments to elementary and middle students of diverse backgrounds to science in a simplified yet extremely educational and informative interactive and fun sessions This sparked an idea. iGEM Cairo spoke to the Children’s University coordinators and set up an exciting session about the ABC project, bacteria, cancer, protective measures, and healthy habits. The session was scheduled on September 1st 2015 and it as exciting, fun-filled and the children both enjoyed and learned from it.

3-Team information exchange sessions

Being an interdisciplinary team and bringing together a group of mechanical engineering, medical, biotechnology, and bioinformatics students, exchanging information was almost a must! In an attempt to benefit the most out of each other’s areas of expertise, we have dedicated a portion of our bi-weekly meetings for exchanging information in the form of presentations followed by discussions and questions. These presentations escalated from being simple introductory overview of each person’s major to detailed and in depth information that’s mostly related to our project.

4- Expanding the iGEM and synthetic biology community in Egypt

Through our work this year, we have reached students in 6 faculties in 5 universities. We have met with students, professors and gave presentations about iGEM, synthetic biology, team Cairo’s mission, vision and goal. Both students and professors showed great interest in iGEM and synthetic biology as most of them did not know the difference between synthetic biology and genetic engineering and we inspired new teams to form, the first being iGEM Alexandria University. Which us led to creating an online community to connect people
Universities
  • Ain Shams University
  • Cairo University
  • Misr University of Science Technology
  • American University in Cairo
  • Alexandria University
  • Suez Canal University
Institutes
  • Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute
  • Breast Cancer Foundation of Egypt
  • Healthy Egyptians
  • 57357 Children Cancer Hospital

5- iGEM-ers Egypt

iGEM-er’s Egypt is an online community created by iGEM Cairo with an aim to:
  1. Recruit new iGEM teams in Egypt.
  2. Introduction of synthetic biology to biotechnology students and professors.
  3. Open forums to discuss progresses in the field of molecular and synthetic biology.
  4. Enable all those interested in the field from different cities and regions in Egypt to connect, interact, and form new iGEM teams
  5. Share team Cairo’s experience being the first iGEM team in Egypt
  6. Mentor new teams, advise and guide them