Team:Jiangnan/Human Practices

OVERVIEW

Backgournd

China has been suffering from serious influenza outbreak since the winter of 2017. Also, China is one of the ten countries with the highest mortality caused by pneumococcus among children under the age of five. And compared with the first type of vaccine, the vaccination rate of the second type of vaccine is still very low. However, the vaccination rate in China is only 2%, and the public lacks cognition on the importance of vaccination as well as the associated knowledge. We are thus motivated to conduct HP on disseminating vaccine related information to the public and surveying people from different social status on their view towards the practical importance of our project, with the aim of enhancing people’ cognition on vaccination and deepening our own understandings on why and how to carry out this project.

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To understand the process of vaccine production, preservation and transportation, as well as vaccination, we visited some factories for vaccine production. During these visits, we found the need of establishing a cell line feasible for rapid production of a broad spectrum of vaccines, and our strategic collaboration partner, ‘Dabeinong Group’, who is willing to finance us in conducting this project. Besides, ‘Dabeinong Group’ has also supported us in offering a company tour to the vaccine production line, viruses, etc. Note that our project fully complies with iGEM’s requirements, as we use animal viruses in this project which are non-infectious to humans. Once this project is successfully completed, not only ‘Dabeinong Group’ could significantly benefit from it by having a self-owned intellectual property cell line with reduced production cost and complexity, but also the whole vaccine industry could be greatly promoted in having a platform of establishing industrially relevant features to cells using synthetic biology approaches.

To seek the practical importance of our project and external expertise to help improve it, we did the following HPs. First, we invited world leading experts from Australia to our university to guide us in our experiments and deepen our understandings on the clinical and industrial importance of this project. Second, we participated in several meet-ups with other iGEM teams. We exchanged our project ideas and discussed unresolved problems in the experiments, and received lots of pertinent suggestions on both sides. Also, we made good friends through these active communications and discussions, which constitutes the most amazing part of our memories

To disseminate vaccination related knowledge and the importance of our project to the public, we visited CDC (Centers for Disease Control), the community epidemic prevention station, two kindergartens and one high school. During this process, we recognized a significant lack of cognition in the public on the importance of getting vaccination in time as well as basic understandings on synthetic biology. When conducting HP on this aspect, we adopted a three-step strategy to approach, stimulate the interest and thinking of the public, i.e., discovery, practice and discussion. Through our persisting efforts, we demonstrated that it is possible to communicate with the public from all ages and diverse disciplines and social status on synthetic biology and science in general; and with our efforts, we have successfully enhanced people’ understandings on vaccination, synthetic biology as well as current social and technical challenges faced in science.