Through human practice, we identified specific people in France who work to combat antibiotic resistance, then directed our research to meet their needs. We had the chance to attend the inter-academic symposium “antimicrobial resistance and society” at the Institut Curie where we met pharmaceutical industrialists, farmers, and researchers. The real needs of real people determined key features of our design: an antimicrobial peptide to treat Gram-negative infections in the piglet intestine.

We are proud of the depth and originality of our human practice work. We met farmers and veterinarians who confront antimicrobial resistance every day. We met policymakers working at the national level to reduce, replace and re-think antibiotics. We obtained raw data from French national health agencies and performed an original analysis to better understand the scope of antibiotic resistance in France. The result of this work was published in Le Figaro, a major national newspaper.

Maksim the piglet had lived a very happy life in his farm in Brittany. Every animal on the farm was happy, the beautiful nature that surrounded them made every day a perfect day. One day, Maksim the little piglet lost his smile and over the next days, he lost his enthusiasm and energy. Little Maksim looked so sad that the farmers decided to take action and called the veterinary. The veterinary diagnosed him with Colibacillosis.

The Paris Bettencourt iGEM team decided to save Maksim the piglet and get the public’s help for that!

Maksim the piglet show is an interactive VR game experience set up inside a container. The first half of the container displayed the research that the iGEM team has done in the wetlab. The second half of the container, set up behind a black curtain, in dimmed light, contained the box with the piglet laid on some straw. Attendees could hear Maksim squeals coming out of his box.

After a first explanation of the terrible disease affecting Maksim the piglet and an overview of our lab research, we invited the attendees to wear a “full body lab suit”, we would arm them with “pipette-guns” and invite them to get on the other side of the curtain where they would get shrinked to the microscale and get inserted into Maksims colon. The fight could then begin.

At the end of August, 20 days before our exhibition at Biodesign Here Now in London UK, the Gamelab told us that we can no longer use the VR set-up because the CRI was moving in their new building in Charles V. So we decided to look over Google Map and find somebody to lend us a VR set-up. After a few convincing emails, we found that person. FX from Sparkling VR, Paris who didn’t just lend us a set-up but also invited us to develop our game whenever we wanted in his game room. There, we met they loved our game and wanted to help us develop it. That’s how we met Salamiden, a young 3D artist who designed our fantastic antibiotic pipet guns and bacteria.

We have been in touch with a company called Cell Free for our wetlab research. It happens that the same people behind Cell Free are Helene Steiner and Thomas Meany who also run Open Cell, a biotech village made from shipping containers in Sheppherd’s Bush Market in London UK.

We had the idea of investigating a shipping container to create or VR experience.Open Cell offered us to install our experience and show it to the public during the London Design Week for the Biodesign Here Now festival in September 2018.

Thanks to the hard work of our developer Mourdjen Bari, the kindness of people from Sparkling VR, the trust of the Gamelab CRI (lend us the VR set-up) and the last minute help of Philippe Llerena who lend us a powerful workstation we were ready to leave Paris for London. When we arrived in London, we also needed to find all the physical equipment for our experience. We really wanted to make it unique and immersive. We needed staw, card box, paint, tarpaulin, lights, and disposable suit. We didn’t have time to get all those small things before, so we asked Sylvie Harding, a relative of our member to do it for us. So we arrived in Sepherd’s Bush for a week of the exhibition. After several memorable last-minute set-up problems, we eventually got everything ready to welcome the public.

Besides the discussions about our project and experience with the public, we had the chance to attend several workshops, lectures, and discussion with the other exhibitors. That is how we met Wim Van Eck, a researcher/artist who was doing a lecture on biological 3D modeling. His artistic process consists of growing bacteria and fungus on Petri dish, scanning them and creating a height-field to displace a 3D grid object to create a 3D terrain. We were amazed by his organic maps so we invited him to experience “Maksim the Piglet”. He loved our experience and decided to help us. Thanks to his unique map generating technic he provided our beautiful convoluted video game map that represents the colon of Maksim!

During this adventure we also experienced the pleasure of London. Marcos, from iGEM King's College, invited us to a party were we a break time to enjoy a drink and share our experiences and insights.

London have been a unique and inspiring experience where we had the chance to meet scientists, entrepreneurs and designers from all over the world but also people just interested in science. We came back to France with a set of fresh ideas to improve our experience.

Our feedbacks from London were amazing so we wanted to develop “Maksim the Piglet” further. That’s why we decided to take it to the next level by presenting it to Two additional events in Paris.

We spent the night meeting people learning and enjoying our experience.

During that day, Ken Perlin the guru of the VR world who let his name to the famous Perlin effect, who works on making VR more accessible, pedagogical and interactive made a mind-blowing lecture in CRI. He was also presenting one of his worldwide known experience Caveman . We discussed with him to explain our project and get some advice. But he did way more than that, he directly came to test “Maksim the Piglet” and told us very fruitful tricks on how to improve it!

Thoses two additional opportunities to talk more about our project and sensibilize people on the problematic of antibiotic resistance were also very enriching. We could experience all the fun cultural differences between French and English speaking public (e.g. reactions to VR, the amazement of the Britons and the more critical reaction of the French). It also brought more perspective and ideas to our project. At the end of these three enriching experience, we had gathered more than 100 people who had tried our experience and filled ours before/after questionnaires. Here is what it looks like :

We installed some lab equipment and created little games for visitors to play while they were waiting to do the VR experience.
TODO Santino/Juliette add details here of the games.

Once we had chosen our field of application, we decided to learn more about the problems faced by the farming industry and animal husbandry in France. So we contacted Marc Quere, a retired veterinarian and writer from Brittany, the core of meat production in France. He gave us lots of insights and drew a picture of the situation in France. He then put us in contact with Paul Pfister, the CEO of a big vet cabinet and Benoit Quero, a vet who is also Maire of a small agricultural town Plumeliau, Britanny and also a consultant for Allmix, a probiotic company. Both of them are experts of animal husbandry and were very interested in our project on Antimicrobial peptides. After long interviews, we decided to meet. So Benoit Quero came to Paris to know more about what we were actually doing and also to help us find the most accurate problematic. That’s how we came up with the issue of digestive pathologies of the piglet in the farm industry. Once we got convinced that piglet is an excellent model to understand antibioresistance and that lots of things had to be done in this field we realize that it would be even more interesting if we could demonstrate with numbers all the stakes of this problematic. So we decided to contact people who monitor antibiotic resistance in France. It’s the governmental French agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety. We then contacted Jean-Yves Madec, the scientific director of the antimicrobial resistance topic at ANSES. He loved our project and decided to help us with the data we needed. The Data was so nice that we wanted to share it! That’s why we contacted a team of data journalist to help us spread the story of antimicrobial resistance in animal husbandry to people. We collaborated with all stakeholders of antimicrobial resistance in the farm industry.

We wanted to find solutions for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the animal farming industry. We contacted and interviewed some veterinarians from Brittany, the core region of animal husbandry in France and learned that digestive pathologies in porc and poultry are particularly tricky. We had the chance to attend the inter-academic Colloque “antimicrobial resistance and society” at the Institut Curie where we met pharmaceutical industrialists, farmers and researchers. With their help, we decided to investigate a promising alternative to antibiotics, AMPs.

We wanted to apply our design so we decided to look at the numbers to choose rationnaly our design in order to link AMPs to husbandry.

Thanks to data collected from Jean-Yves Madec, ANSES, we realize that colibacilosis in piglets is the biggest issue, so we designed our proteins towards this application. We then contacted a team of data journalists from the Figaro and told them our story and the issues raised. This integrated Human practice work is the result of conversation and collaborations between the major stakeholder of antimicrobial resistance in France. We did a collaborative work between data journalists, a mayor and veterinarian and scientists.