Team:IISc-Bangalore/Human Practices
Human Practices
Overview
At the onset, PhageShift may appear to be a pure scientific endeavor, comprising of just experiments and results. However, a closer look would reveal the critical role our Human Practices played in shaping our project, from the very beginning, till the fine tuning stage at the end. Throughout the duration of our project, we were committed to communicating our work to diverse sections in a manner that have maximum impact, as well as keeping an open mind about bacteriophages and taking inputs from stakeholders and experts and incorporating it in our project.
Antibiotic resistance is a looming problem globally, and there have been multiple reports on how underdeveloped and developing countries like would be the worst affected. India is one of the largest consumers of antibiotics, and despite regulations, the problem of easy availability and overuse in medical and poultry industries has contributed to the increasing appearance of resistant strains. We decided to play an active role in educating the public on what the consequences of antibiotic resistance may be, and how one can help by being a responsible consumer.
Bacteriophages are a group of viruses that infect bacteria. To a large section of the society, the term "virus" carries a negative connotation which they associate with infections and biological weapons. This highlighted to us the need to educate the general public on what phages are, and how they have a potential role to play in therapeutics. At the same time, there is a lot of skepticism in the scientific and medical commmunity on phage therapy. This compelled us to investigate and evaluate the viability of our project idea, and to ensure our Human Practices endeavours are carried out in a responsible manner which does not glorify phage therapy as a panacea.
Motivated with the above challenges, we undertook the following activities for our Human Practices. Each of these are explained in detail in our Integrated Human Practices and Public engagement pages.
Crowdfunding
Funding is one of the first and crucial aspects of any project, as often, the direction a project takes is determined by the funds available. Our crowdfunding inititatives involved us being actively involved on social media, inviting questions on our project and explaining our plans in a manner that was simple to understand. Our efforts bore fruit, as we raised Rs. 2,57,810 (~3700 USD)!
Developing a project idea
We started our brainstorming sessions by deciding to look for real world problems that we can harness synthetic biology to solve, and thus, our idea to improve phage therapy to tackle antibiotic resistance grew out of a newspaper article!
Survey
To understand how antibiotics are used in India, as well as to gauge the general perception of phage therapy, we sent out a survey dealing with these two topics to a wide group. We received nearly 200 responses (half of them from medical professionals) which helped us improve our understanding of the problem. We sought to address some of the concerns as part of our project.
Meeting stakeholders
Our project has a direct impact on the medical community, and thus it was important to understand their concerns with antibiotics and phage therapy. We spoke to doctors on the problems faced by antibiotics, and analysed whether phage therapy would face a similar challenge. One important issue which stood out was endotoxin release common to both forms of treatment, and this inspired us to design PAIR, a novel improvement in phage therapy to minimize endotoxin release. We also held an interview with doctors on this. We also met with GangaGen, a biotechnology startup in Bangalore who had worked on lysis-deficient phages and hold two patents related to it. Their insight on our project and working with phages was very helpful for us, especially as we were handling them for the first time.
Conversations
To promote awareness on antibiotic resistance, we designed a brochure in English and the local language Kannada on what antibiotic resistance is, how it arose and what alternatives there are. Then, we went to some popular spots in Bangalore and spoke to the people there and gave them our pamphlet to ponder upon. The people were very receptive, and this was a healthy dose of motivation!
Review of laws
Phage therapy is largely disallowed in most parts of the world, except a few Eastern Europe countries. With rising cases of AMR infections, we felt it was important to provide the starting point for a conversation on the legal status of phage therapy. We reviewed clinical trials and compared laws on them in various parts of the globe, to help policymakers and interested stakeholders gain a better understanding of the subject. We are in the process of publishing our review, and are drafting a legal document on it which will be submitted to the authorities.
Giving talks
India has a mere 137 researchers per million inhabitants, which is very low in comparison to countries like Brazil (694 per million), China (1071 per million), USA (4663 per million). This statistic prompted us to encourage scientific temper in school students, and let them know the joys of research and how they can get involved (the iGEM High School competition for example!). We gave talks in 6 schools in all, speaking to an audience of nearly 300 young minds, and their bubbling enthusiasm was very infectious.
Publishing a book
The technical details of scientific projects often bores the layman. In an effort to educate the public on the consequences of antibiotic resistance, we got together and wrote 7 fictional short stories set in a post antibiotic world. After speaking to our Institute publication house, IIScPress, we are very happy to share that our book, "Resistance: Tales from a post-antibiotic world" has been accepted for publication and will soon be available for everyone to read! We are also in the process of translating it to the local language Kannada, and distributing a free copy in libraries in an effort to reach more people.
Poster Presentation
As hosts of the All India iGEM meetup, we decided to keep the last session of Poster Presentation open to everyone with the consent of the participating teams. This enabled many university students, from undergraduate to post-graduates, to look at all the iGEM projects and learn about them, while also helping teams prepare themselves to speak to audiences of varying technical knowledge.
Guidelines on working with phages
PhageShift was the first time all members of the team had worked with bacteriophages. While we had wonderful support from our mentors and PIs, we still faced plenty of difficulties due to insufficient documentation of previous phage research as well as lack of clear guidelines. To ensure future teams do not face similar difficulties, we prepared an extensively documented guideline with images of our results that should help future iGEM teams and phage researchers to overcome the initial hurdles of working with a new system.
Youtube mini-series
We created a series of mini videos explaining antibiotic resistance and bacteriophages to help the public understand these topics in a simple manner. Without being too technical, these videos were aimed to provide a starting point for anyone to learn the terms we use throughout our project.