Team:Leiden/Human Practices
Integrated Human Practices
During the development of our project, we constantly engaged with experts and members of public to learn and improve our ideas. This page aims to showcase the integration of this feedback into the various aspects of our project. Because feedback was incorporated into so many parts of our project, this page will often link to other wiki pages for more information. Additionally, some texts and names are highlighted in orange. You can You get the gist hover over or click on these orange highlights to receive additional information.
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Antibiotic resistance: A global problem
While investigating possible iGEM projects, we quickly stumbled upon the issue of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance is a rising issue which already costs over 50 000 lives in the European Union and United states every year. According to a recent paper in Nature Microbiology, this issue is expected to deteriorate even further to 10 million annual deaths by 2050[1]. This has lead both the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare antibiotic resistance as one of the greatest threats to global public health[2][3]. During a conversation with Kees de Joncheere worked as a director of the Essential Medicines and Health Products Department at the WHO. For this, he worked in several countries and was involved with AMR and the international policy around it. In addition, he works at the Nederlands Antibiotic Developent Platform, where researchers and private parties are matched. Kees de Joncheere, we learned that there are already several programs set up by the WHO to prevent and reduce antibiotic resistance.
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Resistant bacterial infections
To delve deeper into the issues antibiotic resistant bacteria bring, we talked to various health experts. Jeroen van Gorkom works at the KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation, which is an organisation involved in the fight against tuberculosis. We aproached Jeroen van Gorkom because we wanted to clarify the experience of patients experiencing and doctors treating resistant bacterial infections. Jeroen van Gorkom explained one of those issues is tuberculosis, a bacterium that can cause a severe infection of the lungs. While tuberculosis infections have been decreasing over the past decades, a resistant strain of tuberculosis is now causing a resurgence of infections. Van Gorkem continued by explaining to us the heavy toll treatments of resistant tuberculosis places on patients. After a resistant infection has been diagnosed in the Netherlands, the patient is quarantined for up to six months while receiving intramuscular injections and pills for six days a week. This treatment program can be so hard on a patient, they often struggle with continuing. Patients in other parts of the world are even more unlucky, as Van Gorkem explained, because infrastructure for the treatment of resistant tuberculosis is often not in place, making the disease potentially fatal.
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Choosing our project aim
Antibiotic resistance is a growing international problem with a severe societal impact. Despite increasing efforts of solving it, no definitive solution is in sight yet. Therefore, we decided to devote our iGEM project to making a leap forward into finding a solution for this crisis, and helping safeguard humanity’s future.
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Problem 1: no new antibiotics are being discovered
One of the main causes of the antibiotic resistance crisis is the lack of new antibiotic discoveries. Research is being conducted to discover new antibiotics, however only a handful of new antibiotics have been found in the last three decades[4]. The field of antibiotics is not lucrative enough for pharmaceutical companies and newly discovered compounds remain similar in function to current antibiotics. As a result companies like Novartis and Big Pharma are retreating from the research field, while the need for new antibiotics keeps increasing[8]. During our conversation with Marcel de Kort is the coordinator of the Dutch Antibiotic Resistance Program of the ministery of Public Health, Welfare and Sports. We talked with Marcel de Kort to gain insights on the policy and programs around antibiotic resistance on a national level. Marcel de Kort, we got confirmation that the development of antibiotics is decreasing: “the pharmaceutical pipeline is drying up”. We have tried to contact companies who are in the field antibiotic discovery, unfortunately we did not get any response.
Although discovering new antibiotics can temporarily address the antibiotic resistance crisis, this does not prevent resistance from forming towards these new antibiotics. Therefore, research into novel antibiotics comprises a “technological fix”, an issue brought to our attention by Robert Zwijnenberg is a professor of Art and Science Interactions at Leiden University. He is educated in civil engineering and philosophy and we wanted to discuss with him the ethics surrounding our project and synthetic biology. Robert Zwijnenberg. Therefore, a solution should also consider tackling resistance at its source. -
Problem 2: awareness for antibiotic resistance is lacking
Another cause of the antibiotic resistance crisis is the misuse of antibiotics. During his work as the director of Essential Medicines and Health Products Department at the WHO, Kees de Joncheere learned a lot about differences in antibiotic use between countries and cultures. Kees de Joncheere and Patrick Bindels is a general practicioner at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. We talked with him to learn more about the view on antibiotics from general practicioners and their experience with patients infected with resistant bacteria Patrick Bindels explained to us that antibiotics are often over prescribed, in some countries one can even buy antibiotics at the pharmacy. This leads to increased use of antibiotics - thereby increasing the formation of resistance - while treatment isn’t actually improved. This problem is the case in some countries of the European Union (EU). However, particularly outside the EU, this is a big problem in the fight against antibiotic resistance.
Therefore, we talked with Rowen de Jong is the National Public Health Officer of IFMSA-NL. The IFMSA is an internationally oriented student organisation which works on several global health issues. We talked with Rowen de Jong because the IFMSA has an international workgroup on antibiotic resistance. Rowen de Jong from IFMSA-NL, who also stated that they recognize the problem of antibiotic overuse. They have released a policy statement which states that antibiotic prescriptions must be decreased and that people need to be made more aware of the consequences of antibiotic resistance if we want to have any hope of tackling antibiotic resistance. This became even clearer in our conversation with Jeroen van Gorkom works at the KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation, which is an organisation involved in the fight against tuberculosis. We aproached Jeroen van Gorkom because we wanted to clarify the experience of patients experiencing and doctors treating resistant bacterial infections. Jeroen van Gorkom, who also told us that patients are often tempted to stop with their antibiotic treatment when they are feeling better. However, this can lead to the survival of some resistant bacteria, which can then spread again, further driving the spread of resistance.
Additionally, we talked with During his work as the director of Essential Medicines and Health Products Department at the WHO, Kees de Joncheere learned a lot about differences in antibiotic use between countries and cultures. Kees de Joncheere about antibiotic use in livestock farming. Extensive use of antibiotics in livestock causes resistant bacteria to form in livestock, and also leads to antibiotic pollution in the environment. The concern of this issue is that the resistant livestock bacteria can transfer their resistance to human bacteria. Therefore, antibiotic use for livestock has been regulated in the EU, however, outside of the EU regulation is less strict, which leads to an increase of antibiotic resistant bacteria. -
Clarifying our project goals
Following our discussions with various health experts, we concluded that the antibiotic resistance crisis consists of two main problems. Firstly, we need new types of antibiotics, but with the current methods those are not being found. Secondly, resistance spreads due to an overuse and misconception of antibiotics. Therefore, in order to solve this problem we need to tackle both the lack of new antibiotics being discovered, as well as the way the antibiotics are used. With our project we will attempt to revitalize the research for new antibiotics. Additionally, we will attempt to create more international awareness about antibiotic resistance by means of education and societal outreach.
One of the problems we recognized during our discussions with experts is that no new novel antibiotics are being found, while we are in desperate need of new ones to help treat resistant bacterial infections. Therefore, we decided to engage with researchers in the field of antibiotics to learn what could be done to revitalize research.
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Missed opportunities of antibiotic research
In our conversation with Kees de Joncheere worked as a director of the Essential Medicines and Health Products Department at the WHO. For this, he worked in several countries and was involved with AMR and the international policy around it. In addition, he works at the Nederlands Antibiotic Developent Platform, where researchers and private parties are matched. Kees de Joncheere we talked about the current methods that are used to find new antibiotics. Researchers are looking for lethal substances using methods such as overlays and disc diffusion. In these experiments, potential antibiotics are placed on a layer of bacteria. Should the tested substance be antibiotic, the surrounding bacteria should die which is visible as a death halo. However, the mode of action is not identified with this method. Alternatively, candidate compounds are added to cultures of bacteria to see whether growth is being inhibited. Although these methods have been successful in the past, the fact no new antibiotic classes have been discovered for three decades suggests these discovery methods are no longer sufficient[4].
Looking into this antibiotic discovery research, we saw two missed opportunities: looking further than only lethal substances and looking at the mode of action at an early point in research. By utilizing these two missed opportunities, attempts could be made to look for combination therapies of stressful substances. These Read more about our approach and combination therapies on our Project Description page combination therapies would not only serve as novel antibiotic treatments, but could also be less susceptible to antibiotic resistance[5][6][7]. Thereby, this is not merely a “technological fix”. -
Our approach
Based on these missed opportunities, we designed a synthetic biology system which utilizes stress-activated promoters linked to visual reporters. For this, we try to find promoters which are upregulated in stressful situations. We chose Escherichia coli (E. coli) as our model organism for gram-negative bacteria and Bacillus subtilis for gram-positive bacteria. For the visual reporters to be produced by our stress-activated promoters, we considered three options: luciferase, GFP and chromoproteins. To determine which to use, we engaged with possible future users of our system.
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GFP fluorescent markers
During our conversation with Coen van Hasselt is an assistant professor at the Division of Systems Biomedicine and Pharmacology, which is part of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). He performs research on antibiotic treatments, therefore we wanted to hear his advice. Coen van Hasselt, we found out that GFP is a good candidate for our visual reporter because GFP measurements can be quantifies with relative ease. This is a trait many researchers are looking for in the antibiotic discovery field. Kees van den Hondel is a professor emeritus microbiology of filamentus fungi at Leiden University and the Leiden University Medical Centre. We talked with him because he performed a study comparable to our project, thus we aksed for some feedback about problems and methods. Kees van den Hondel confirmed this and added that GFP provides a signal which is easy to measure as it is commonly used in biological research. Therefore the equipment required for measurement of GFP is widely available. Additionally, many variants of GFP exist which fluoresce at different wavelengths, allowing measurements of different stress reactions in a single cell.
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Luciferase
Another option for our visual reporter is luciferase, which was brought to our attention by Kees van den Hondel is a professor emeritus microbiology of filamentus fungi at Leiden University and the Leiden University Medical Centre. We talked with him because he performed a study comparable to our project, thus we aksed for some feedback about problems and methods. Kees van den Hondel, who uses this visualisation method himself. The luciferase system is based on a conversion reaction. When luciferase is produced by the cell, it can create light by breaking down a substrate added to the culture medium. The advantage of this system is that no special equipment is needed to measure the signal. However, the luciferase can be expensive and is less popular in use, meaning people will be less familiar with it. Additionally, measuring multiple different wavelengths with luciferase is more complicated.
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Chromoproteins
The last option we considered was the use of chromoproteins, which are proteins that produce a colour visible to the naked eye. Because chromoproteins are visible to the naked eye, it would allow us to create an easy to interpret system. This easy detection would allow anyone, in any situation, to use our system. For example, this could enable testing for substances in hard to reach locations, far away from laboratories, where all current antibiotic discovery research is being conducted. Additionally, because detection would be cheap, many people could join the search for new antibiotics.
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Choosing our visual reporters
Based on our discussions with possible future users, we concluded fluorescent markers and chromoproteins would be the best visual reporters for our system. Chromoproteins would be perfect to include the entire world in our hunt for antibiotics, and fluorescent markers would enable researchers to quantify results. We dropped luciferase because it held some disadvantages compared to fluorescent markers, while being similar in function.
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Designing a product
After deciding how our bacterial stress detection system would work on a synthetic biology level, we now started thinking how we could best implement this system to be used by as many people as possible. For this, we talked with Zoë Robaey is a researcher in ethics of technology. At the Rathenau Institue she works on ethical issues of synthetic biology. We wanted to talk with her to get feedback concerning the ethical aspects of our project and to talk about patents. Zoë Robaey on the distribution of our system. Together with her, we decided that it is important to keep our cell line open source so it can be used by anyone, worldwide. However, to make our cell line easy-to-use by anyone, we should also design a kit around it for it to be used
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A visual reporter kit
For our first product design, we wanted to create a tool which is easy to handle for anyone without special lab equipment. Once this goal is reached, a kit like this could also be used in isolated or poorer areas. These areas may hold antibacterial substances which, without our tool, cannot be found. To achieve this tool, we chose to use chromoproteins as the visualisation method, because they are visible to the naked eye and do not need special lab equipment. The Read more about our first kit design on our Product Design page resulting kit would be a cheap way to investigate substances, with easy to interpret results and the ability to measure a large amount of substances at once.
However, using GFP and other fluorescent markers also has advantages for researchers in the lab, since these produce quantifiable results. Therefore, we also created a cell line containing GFP, but this would not be developed into a tool. Both cell lines would be open source as all the information is described in the iGEM registry, and could thereby used and improved upon by anyone. -
Safety
Thereafter, we talked with Cecile van der Vlugt works at the RIVM (National Institution for Public Health and the Environment). She is an expert on Biosafety and GMO regulation, which were topics we wanted to know more about. Cecile van der Vlugt about the the regulation of genetic modified organisms and their use outside laboratoria. Based on this discussion, we came to realise that our initial idea, which could be used outside the lab, would come with some large Read more about our safety considerations on our Safety page safety issues. Therefore, we decided to adapt our design to only be used in the lab.
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Chromoproteins in research
Following the creation of our first product design, we visited Gilles van Wezel is scientific director and professor of Molecular Biotechnology at the Institute of Biology in Leiden. Gilles van Wezel who works with overlays that are interpreted by the naked eye. For this method our chromoprotein cell lines could be very suitable, because they would allow for the In these experiments, potential antibiotic producing bacteria are placed on another layer of bacteria. Should the tested bacteria be producing an antibiotic, the surrounding bacteria should die, which is visible as a death halo. overlay system to be expanded to also determine mode of action and to allow for the detection of stressful substances. However, because this merely requires our chromoprotein cell lines, we found that for these type of studies developing a tool with the chromoprotein cell line is not necessary.
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Second iteration
Since we would no longer be using our tool outside of the lab due to safety concerns, the advantage of chromoproteins being easy to detect was no longer as important. Especially as most modern labs are able to measure fluorescent markers. Additionally, the main users of our chromoproteins system in the lab would not want it in a tool, but rather as separate cell lines. Therefore, we decided to instead create a fluorescent marker based tool which can be used for easy screening and quantification. Our chromoprotein system will now be developed as a cell line instead. To determine how our fluorescent based tool should work, we again engaged with future users.
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Compatibility
Based on our conversation with Coen van Hasselt is an assistant professor at the Division of Systems Biomedicine and Pharmacology, which is part of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). He performs research on antibiotic treatments, therefore we wanted to hear his advice. Coen van Hasselt, who wants to quantify his results, we decided to use a 96 wells plate for our tool. Because this is a standard format in research and most fluorescence measurement equipment is designed for this format.
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Safety
In our conversations with Cecile van der Vlugt works at the RIVM (National Institution for Public Health and the Environment). She is an expert on Biosafety and GMO regulation, which were topics we wanted to know more about. Cecile van der Vlugt and Mirjam Schaap works at the RIVM (National Institution for Public Health and the Environment) for the Bureau Biosecurity department. We talked with her about the safety and potential misuse of our product. Mirjam Schaap we talked about the safety of our product and we concluded we should package our product in two biosafety seals, and we should freeze dry our cell lines for transport. In this way, the bacteria will be dried and rendered disabled. This way, the transport is safer compared to alive bacteria. Once at the destination, the bacteria can easily be revived. More information on the integration of safety can be found on our Safety page.
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Easy to use and high throughput compatible
We also visited Timo Koopmans is the COO of Karveel Pharmaceuticals, which is a Dutch biotech company which produces antibiotics for drug resistant infections. We talked with him about the development and production of antibiotics. Besides, we talked about the presentation of our tool. Timo Koopmans of Karveel Pharmaceuticals. He is involved in the production of antibiotics and mentioned we have to focus on the usability. As he said: “Everyone in an ML1-lab must be able to use your tool. It has to be user-friendly and compatible”. Thus, we have to create a clear manual and try to keep the number of preparation steps to use our tool to a minimum. Additionally, Timo Koopmans explained larger pharmaceutical companies would likely want to use our system for high throughput screening when they use our product. Again, this would make ease-of-use very important and further supports the plan to use a 96 wells plate format.
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Low throughput
During a conversation with biomedical researcher Peter Nibbering is a senior researcher at the Leiden University Medical Center Leiden. His research focusses on the identification and mode of action of potential antimicrobials. We talked with him to get feedback on our product. Peter Nibbering we realised high throughput is not always required. Many academic researchers actually research specific substances and would want to use our system for small scale stress and mode of action determination. Therefore, our final product should also be easy to use in low - as well as high - throughput studies.
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The 50S.O.S. bacterial stress detection screening kit
Based on these criteria, we decided to create a product in a 96-wells plate format, which is compatible and easy to use. The bacteria in our product have to be freeze dried, in order to allow safe transport, and revived at the place of destination. The entire 96-wells plate can be filled for high throughput screening or just partly for low throughput studies. Our screening kit will be named 50S.O.S., after our iGEM project Fifty Shades of Stress.
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Starting a business
To spread our product around the world, we would create a start-up and start selling our 50S.O.S. kit. This way, anyone can simply purchase our kit and it can function as a golden standard for antibiotic screening worldwide. For business advice, we spoke to Giel Hendriks is the CEO of Toxys, a biotech company that provides in vitro toxicity screening in mammalian cells. We spoke with him to learn from his experience in starting a business, and because their products are similar to our system. Giel Hendriks and he advised us to write a business plan for our product. Using this business plan, we obtained further feedback and marketing advice from Frits Fallaux is a knowlegde broker for LURIS, which connects university departments with the market and society at large. Because of his knowlegde about start-ups and businesses, we talked with Frits Fallaux about the marketing of our product. Frits Fallauxat LURIS. Based on their feedback, we developed an extensive plan for Read about our business plan on our Entrepreneurship page our future business.
During our problem explorations we realised antibiotic resistance consists of two problems. Although our system helps solve the problem of antibiotic discovery, we still need to ensure antibiotics are used properly, so that resistance doesn’t quickly spread against new antibiotics. Therefore, we decided to create our own public outreach program to help educate people on antibiotic resistance.
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Making people aware of the problem
On a national and international level there are already policy statements and rules to decrease resistance. However, it became clear in our conversation with During his work as the director of Essential Medicines and Health Products Department at the WHO, Kees de Joncheere learned a lot about differences in antibiotic use between countries and cultures. Kees de Joncheere that adjustments must also be made on a lower, individual scale. We spoke to several governmental organisations to see what they do to make the public more aware of this topic. Maria le Grand is a policy officer at the European Ministery of Welfare, Health and Sport. We talked with her to get an overview of the international policy's surrounding antibiotic resistance. Maria le Grand and Marcel de Kort is the coordinator of the Dutch Antibiotic Resistance Program of the ministery of Public Health, Welfare and Sports. We talked with Marcel de Kort to gain insights on the policy and programs around antibiotic resistance on a national level. Marcel de Kort both explained to us that the Netherlands is doing very well in terms of public awareness of antibiotic resistance in comparison to other countries. Therefore, it is important more public outreach is directed to an international audience. However, it also remains important to keep Dutch people aware of the threat of antibiotic resistance, and particularly how antibiotics should be used. Therefore, we concluded that our public outreach projects should be both in Dutch and English, so that they can also be used abroad. Additionally, During his work as the director of Essential Medicines and Health Products Department at the WHO, Kees de Joncheere learned a lot about differences in antibiotic use between countries and cultures. Kees de Joncheere stressed the importance of smaller local projects, as some citizens might not be as fast to trust large governmental projects. By having one-on-one conversations with people it is easier to address their concerns, create awareness, and explain the parts they do not understand yet.
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Science Day Hannover Messe
Our first step in public engagement was giving a Read more about our workshop on our Education and Public Engagement page workshop at the Science Day Hannover Messe, organised by the University of Twente for high school students to motivate them to learn about science. We used a variety of experiments to engage the students on synthetic biology, the threat of antibiotic resistance and how to help prevent resistance.
This workshop worked effectively to engage students on the subjects of antibiotic resistance and synthetic biology. However, due to the complexity of the experiments it would not be possible to reach larger crowds of people. -
Industry day
Thereafter, we went to Industry day where scientists, artists and entrepreneurs meet to discuss the world of science and art. Here we presented two larger pieces of agar art as a way to start a discussion about antibiotic resistance, and to raise awareness for this topic. Here we spoke to experts about how to present the problem to a larger audience. They verified for us that the agar art was a great way to bring up this topic and start a discussion.
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Larger agar art workshops
Now that we knew that agar art works well to start a discussion, we developed and performed a workshop at the Museum Night and Werfpop Festival, which both took place in Leiden. We set up the workshop as well as a poster which explained our project. Part of our team focussed on explaining our project and the issue of antibiotic resistance to visitors, whilst the rest of our team would help with the agar art workshop and speak to the participants of this workshop. This turned out to be a great success and we received lots of pictures of the drawings participants made through our social media.
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Literature
To learn even more about teaching, we looked into literature. Here, we found three main teaching methods. The most common way is the teacher-centered approach, where the students are passive and only listen to the teacher through lectures. The second way is a discussion focused method. This involves discussing the topic with the students and they learn through this discussion. The last method is problem based learning. Here, students get a task or exercise. The teacher does not give them any sort of prior information but through doing the exercise the students will learn about the topic. The advantage of the problem based learning is that information is remembered much better by students. Additionally, problem-based learning can be a lot more fun for students because they are actively engaged[9].
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Expanding our workshop
The workshop works very well, however, in the future we would want our workshop to be usable internationally. For this, we want to further develop the workshop to be easy to perform. We also decided we wanted to focus on a workshop using problem based learning, where students figure out how resistance works by themselves. This will help them remember what they have learned. To achieve this, we created an escape room.
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Developing our escape room
Escape rooms are interactive but also motivate the participants to really think about the problem in a creative way. In addition, it is a nice energizer for the discussion afterwards. We conducted our Read more about our workshop on our Education and Public Engagement page Escape room for the first time at the EL CID, the introduction week of Leiden University. The students who participated in the workshop were very enthusiastic about it. They did however say that they would like to learn more about the topic and missed a clear take home message.
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WHO
To further improve the workshop and its take home message, we discussed it with employees at the World Health Organisation. They have a lot of experience with raising awareness on antibiotic resistance internationally. They stressed the importance of the educational part of the workshop. Therefore we decided to add a presentation about antibiotic resistance to the workshop which helps to add a clear take home message to the workshop.
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Further improving our workshop
We improved the workshop further by including an interactive quiz at the start of our workshop, to ensure players start the following escape room engaged. We also added a presentation at the end which will help to give some more detailed information on the topic and to give clear take home messages.
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Testing our workshop
Firstly we gave the workshop at the first day of the Bachelor Biomedical Sciences at Leiden University for the first year students. The workshop was very well received by the students and they told us they had learned a lot. However, these students were already interested in biology and medicine. So, we wanted to see if this workshop would also work for students with less prior knowledge on the topic. Therefore, we decided to give the workshop to high school students at the Da Vinci College high school. The students, aged 16/17, of the Da Vinci College tried our workshop as well. They were very motivated to finish the escape room. During our discussion we found out that most students did hear about this problem before, but they were not too worried. The main reason was because they thought they could not affect the rate of antibiotic resistance. During our presentation we discussed ways in which they could make a change. When the workshop was complete, the students knew more about how their actions can affect the rate of resistance and both students and teachers were very positive about the workshop.
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Spreading our workshop across the world
Our final workshop is an interactive and fun way to learn about antibiotic resistance and has been shown to be a success. In order to keep our workshop in use, we have made it publicly available on our wiki and encourage anyone to use it and improve upon it. Additionally, we have given our workshop to the Dutch division of the International Federation of Medical Student Associations, to spread it further around the world.
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Looking at product exploitation strategies
Now that we have successfully developed our 50S.O.S. screening system and “Escape the resistance” workshop, it has become time to look at the future. Following a discussion with Frits Fallaux is a knowlegde broker for LURIS, which connects university departments with the market and society at large. Because of his knowlegde about start-ups and businesses, we talked with Frits Fallaux about the marketing of our product. Frits Fallaux from LURIS about our project and business plan, we started thinking about how we would invest the profit we would make with our product. Frits explained to us the most important points to think about when writing a business plan and what the advantages and disadvantages were of different exploitation strategies.
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A hybrid business plan
Based on the feedback of LURIS we decided to form a hybrid business plan. This means we would patent and produce the kit and sell it to different users for profit. Next, this profit will be invested into further research of the kit, as well as in research into new mixes of compounds that can be used as antibiotics. Once we have found a new antibiotic, we will market it ourselves. This ensures that the antibiotic will make it onto the market and is not lost in a production pipeline of large pharmaceutical companies. This second plan has a high risk but we will be able to do so, because by then we have a steady income through our kit. More information on our plans can be found on our Entrepreneurs page .
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Further research
Our cell line is modular which means our kit is just the start. It can be expanded by adding more promoters or creating the same cell line in a different model organism. Due to our participation in iGEM, our research is open source which means everyone can add to our project to allow it to fit to their wishes. Our kit could be used as a new golden standard in antibiotic discovery. By using the same kit in all labs, results will be comparable and therefore more reliable, which fits perfectly with the ideas of iGEM and interlab.
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Safeguarding our future
When we started our project, we identified two main problems in antibiotic resistance by talking to health experts. Firstly, no new antibiotics are being found, and secondly, our current antibiotics are often misused, thereby fueling resistance. To solve the first problem, we developed a bacterial stress screening kit based on repeated expert feedback. This kit can be used to discover novel antibiotic combination therapies. To tackle the second problem, we spoke to experts involved in policy and public engagement of antibiotic resistance to create an interactive workshop which uses an escape room to explain the problem of antibiotic resistance. Additionally, we decided - together with business and marketing experts - to make our research available open source, and we have updated all research groups we were in contact with that our cell lines have been completed. We hope that other research teams will pick up our research to fight antibiotic resistance with the help of our cell lines and the 50S.O.S. screening kit.
References
[1]: O'Neill, J. (2014). Antimicrobial Resistance: Tackling a crisis for the health and wealth of nations. Retrieved from https://amr-review.org/sites/default/files/AMR%20Review%20Paper%20-%20Tackling%20a%20crisis%20for%20the%20health%20and%20wealth%20of%20nations_1.pdf
[2]: World Health Organisation (WHO). (2018, February 5). Antibiotic Resistance. Retrieved October 9, 2018, from http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antibiotic-resistance
[3]: World Health Organisation (WHO). (2016, September 19). Antimicrobial Resistance: Global action plan on antimicrobial resistance. Retrieved October 9, 2018, from http://www.who.int/antimicrobial-resistance/global-action-plan/en/
[4]: Silver, L. L. (2011). Challenges of Antibacterial Discovery. Clinical Microbiology Reviews, 24(1), 71–109. https://doi.org/10.1128/cmr.00030-10
[5]: Xu, X., Xu, L., Yuan, G., Wang, Y., Qu, Y., & Zhou, M. (2018). Synergistic combination of two antimicrobial agents closing each other’s mutant selection windows to prevent antimicrobial resistance. Scientific Reports, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-25714-z
[6]: Yardley, D. A. (2013). Drug Resistance and the Role of Combination Chemotherapy in Improving Patient Outcomes. International Journal of Breast Cancer, 2013, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/137414
[7]: Katlama, C. (1996). Safety and Efficacy of Lamivudine-Zidovudine Combination Therapy in Antiretroviral-Naive Patients. JAMA, 276(2), 118. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1996.03540020040027
[8]: Hu, C. (2018, 21 juli). Pharmaceutical companies are backing away from a growing threat that could kill 10 million people a year by 2050. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.nl/major-pharmaceutical-companies-dropping-antibiotic-projects-superbugs-2018-7/?international=true&r=US
[9]: Schuh, K. L. (2004). Learner-centered principles in teacher-centered practices? Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(8), 833–846. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2004.09.008