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<h1>Mr. Gerald Talhoff (28/06/2018)</h1>
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<p>Mr Gerald is the Global Manufacturing and Supply Chain Vice President of the DyStar Group.  His current responsibilities range from managing global manufacturing footprint to supply chain management and even to corporate sustainability. With more than 20 years of experience in the dye industry under his belt, Mr. Gerald was able to impart pearls of wisdom gleaned from his many years of experience to our inquisitive young minds. </p>
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<p>During our interview with Mr Gerald, he introduced to us the core tenets driving DyStar’s sustainability initiatives. Central to their thrust was a three-fold approach - reducing the production carbon footprint, ensuring consumer safety by keeping hazardous chemicals out of textiles and dyes used, and striving for biodegradable textiles and materials used for dyeing. </p>
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<p>Mr Gerald validated our proposed design, pointing out that balancing environmental friendliness and commercial feasibility would no longer be unfeasible. Instead, co-opting sustainable practices in textile dyeing would become a competitive advantage; governmental agencies around the world are taking tougher actions against environmentally-unfriendly practices and pollution. </p>
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<p>When discussing our potential solutions, he anticipated a critical hurdle we would have to overcome: our solution must attain significant yield for it to have a significant impact on the dye market. From his experience, past attempts at producing bio-engineered dyes have failed to become commercially-viable due to their failure to achieve significant yield. This is a potentially disastrous pitfall that we must seek to circumvent.</p>
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<p>Besides our solution of producing microbial dyes, Mr Gerald warned us against the production of natural dyes using agricultural biomass as feedstock. The resulting competition between food production and natural dye production would indeed be very unfavourable for. In addition, disposal of used biomass would exacerbate the problem of resource wastage. Adding to his previous point, Mr Gerald taught us that it was imperative to evaluate the entire production process for its eco-friendliness, taking into account energy and water consumption, waste generation, to name a few.  
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An interesting twist to the end of the interview, Mr Gerald raised the possibility for the obsolescence of dyes in future, as textiles could coloured by virtue of its physical properties, or perhaps the invention of new materials that are not amenable to current dyeing methods. To tie the interview up, before continuing on our journey with synthetic biology, he encouraged us to evaluate bioengineered products around the world critically.
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<p>Dr. Melissa Fernandez is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Medical Biology, A*STAR. We spoke with Dr. Melissa and her team to gain a better understanding on one of our initial ideas – promoting wound healing of chronic wounds in the tropical setting. She explained to us that developing wound dressings with biosensors would be extremely difficult, and would not be a feasible project to accomplish within three months. </p>
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<p>She advised us about the complexities of chronic wounds – namely the different types of chronic wounds, from diabetic ulcers to venous leg ulcers. On top of the types of wounds, patients will have a lot of comorbidities, which very heavily influence the wound healing factor. This makes wound healing very complex, whereby the underlying pathogenesis is hard to elicit. Focusing on one pathway may capture only 10% of the patients. </p>
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<p>She gave us a thorough walk-through of the wound healing process, and identified problems we had not anticipated; for example - testing for the other substances that the bacteria produce and their effects on the wounds will take very long. These might have unforeseen effects, such as binding to enzymes and growth factors produced by our bodies, making them inactive or even pathogenic. </p>
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  <div class="text">Dr Foo Lee Joon</div>
 
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  <div class="text"> Mr Holger Schlaefke</div>
 
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<h1>25/5/2018 - Dr Sharon Salmon & Dr. Roland Jureen</h1>
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  <div class="text">Mr Gerard Talhoff</div>
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<p>Dr. Sharon Salmon is the National University Health System’s Assistant Director of Nursing, and an expert on infectious diseases. We contacted her as a part of our team’s final efforts to select a project. She gave us a pleasant surprise when she invited Dr Roland Jureen to participate in the interview as well. Dr Jureen is the Head and Senior Consultant of the National University Hospital’s Department of Laboratory Medicine. We hoped to find out if our idea for a better detector for CP-CRE was feasible, and if not, what else could we attempt in the three precious months before the Giant Jamboree. </p>
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<p>While they acknowledged the importance of improving MDRO detection methods, they counselled that given our circumstances, it would be challenging to produce a working prototype. They suggested that our efforts could be better spent elsewhere, such as developing a test for active TB to assist clinicians with the differential diagnosis. We discussed potential methods and biomarkers, and also learned that to improve on existing tests, we needed to prioritize patient care and create an affordable point-of-care test.</p>
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<p>From the interview, we gained an overview of current solutions to MDRO and TB detection, and Drs. Salmon and Jureen made us aware of the stiff competition we would face, from other university research teams, to pharmaceutical conglomerates, all of whom are investing a staggering amount of time and money into solving the same problem we were considering. We concluded that for either CP-CRE or TB detection, it was unlikely that our team would produce a solution to outperform current or developing ones, and the resources so generously granted to us could be better spent solving another problem. This avenue of inquiry was thus drawn to a close.</p>
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<p>As a footnote to the conclusion of our MDRO adventures, we must mention that Dr Salmon and Dr Jureen selflessly sacrificed their lunch hour for the interview! We are very, very grateful for their help.
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  <div class="text">Ms Leong Minyi</div>
 
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<h1>Miss Leong Minyi (18/06/2018)</h1>
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<p>Miss Leong Minyi, a Fashion Design graduate of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, is the founder of Mai Textile Studio. Her beautiful art and clothes are created using traditional Japanese indigo dyeing techniques such as shibori and katazome. As she currently works directly with natural dyes and textiles, we felt that her perspective on our problem would be invaluable.</p>
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  <div class="text">Mr Vinod Agnihotri</div>
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<p>Having come fresh from a team meeting about the salient points gained from our interview with a representative from the synthetic dye industry, it was interesting to see which were supported by Miss Leong, and on which points did their views diverge. For example, both parties agreed that natural dyes appealed to a niche market in Singapore, and for the most part, consumers are not concerned with the origin of the dye, but rather how it looks on their clothes as well as their bank account statements. However, Miss Leong was more skeptical about the representative’s recommendations on how natural dyes could be made more appealing to a wider market, so she gave us some suggestions of her own. This included producing primary colours, but focusing on red and blue as yellow is not normally a colour people wear. She was more positive about natural dyes, stating that contrary to common belief, some natural dyes can be extremely colour and light-fast, and it depends on how the fabric is treated before and after dyeing.  </p>
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<p>Drawing on her experience of working with natural dyes, she taught us much about the different plants we could consider extracting dyes from and creative techniques such as infusing cellulose-based textiles with protein to increase the dye’s fastness. We even touched on her deeply moving experience of meeting her idol, the late legendary experimental textile designer Junichi Arai. From this interview, we became aware of even more factors to consider when designing our dye, such as the  minimum ratio of water to dye to the weight of the fabric, or how much dye is required to get a specific intensity. </p>
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<p>Her artisanal approach has introduced our team to a whole new paradigm, where the inherent flaws of natural dyes are valuable precisely because of their imperfect nature. One criticism of natural dyes is that they are dull and muted. However, during the interview, we learned a secret - because of this, all natural dyes match well with each other. In contrast, synthetic dyes would appear garish. </p>
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<p>Miss Leong’s interview was incredibly helpful, yet our task ahead has become even more difficult, because we now have to consider the problem on a more visceral, aesthetic level. But we believe that makes our problem all the more worthwhile to solve.
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<p>Mr Vinod Agnihotri manages LANXESS operations in Singapore, as well as its Material Protection Products Business Unit for the Asia Pacific region. While LANXESS is no longer involved in textile dye production, Mr Agnihotri himself has a degree in Chemistry, and another in Textile Chemistry and Fibre Technology. As Singapore does not have a textile industry, we felt very fortunate to have found such an expert.</p>
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<p>We started the interview by discussing fashion’s environmental impact. Once again, we were told that the textile and dye industries were not environmentally-friendly in all aspects. He confirmed our problem statement by identifying the most pollutive part of fashion - the production of the dye itself. The water quality of water bodies near dye factories are an especially big concern, and the pollutive impact of the chemicals depends on the method of production and the yield. </p>
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<p>After hearing what we planned to do to solve this, Mr Agnihotri told us that to be competitive, our dyes need to achieve industry fastness levels, and we have to produce many shades with high reproducibility, while remaining economic. In short, while natural dyes could be relatively better for the environment compared to synthetic dyes, our natural dyes still need to meet performance criteria demanded by consumers. </p>
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<p>To wrap up our interview, we went through the perceptions of different stakeholders. Firstly, as consumers are getting more savvy, there is a growing demand for higher-quality, less pollutive dyes. Secondly, he pointed out that the educated layman, as a consumer, may be repulsed by the idea of bacteria having previously been in the dye, even if we claim that all the bacteria has been removed from the dye. This was valuable to us because our team initially believed that consumers and designers would be more interested in our dyes if they knew it had been made using synthetic biology. It indicates that our next step for Human Practices should be to find out how many other people share his opinion. Thirdly, eco-friendly dyes are something chemical companies would welcome, because the average consumer associates “chemical” with “harmful”. Lastly, he suggested that to become commercially successful, we could collaborate with prominent brands in the fashion industry who are willing to experiment with natural dyes. </p>
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<p>Mr. Holger Schlaefke is the Global Marketing Manager for Cellulosic Dyes at Huntsman Textiles Effects. With an impressive 21 years of experience in the dyeing and textile industry under his belt, he was an excellent person to approach to find out more about what we should consider when designing a dye. It helped that Mr Schlaefke was warmly hospitable and accommodating, and extremely forthcoming with his knowledge about dyes. </p>
 
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<p>The interview validated the need for more sustainable dyeing technologies to reduce the water pollution caused by the textile industry, and helped us affirm the key aspects of the problem. We also found the answers we sought! From an industry perspective, we now know that we should take into account how dye manufacturers need to be agile in response to the fashion industry’s ever-changing demands for the trendiest colours of the season, and the requirements our dye must fulfill to be considered eco-friendly, among others. </p>
 
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<p>On the topic of natural versus sustainable dyes, we learned that the industry is keener on using synthetic dyes rather than natural dyes even though natural dyes are far more environmentally friendly. This is because of the industry’s perception that firstly, synthetic dyes are far superior to natural dyes in terms of wear resistance, secondly, producing synthetic dyes is much easier, and finally, companies producing synthetic dyes would have to completely revise their machinery and infrastructure to accommodate natural dyes. He foresees that it will be difficult to persuade textile producers and other major stakeholders to adopt new, potentially industry-disrupting solutions involving natural dyes. </p>
 
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<p>We then shared our vision of producing natural dyes biosynthetically, to which he listed important challenges and obstacles to anticipate and overcome should we decide to continue on this path. Furthermore, he suggested that producing primary colours or brighter and bolder colours would be more impressive and would make our solution more attractive to our stakeholders.</p>
 
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<p>At the end of the interview, Mr Holger encouraged us to never give up, and even jestingly reminded us that whatever we do, there was one thing we should never forget - to get a patent for our project!
 
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<p>Dr. Foo Jee Loon is a senior research fellow from the Department of Biochemistry at the NUS Yong Yoo Lin School of Medicine. We approached him for his expertise in engineering microbes for biochemical production. He reviewed the metabolic pathway that we were proposing and determined that controlling the flux of intermediates was key to allowing our engineered cells to switch between different product pathways.</p>
 
 
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<p>He noted that the project would be complex due to the large number of enzymes involved. Because of this, he warned us of the large amount of characterization work that would be required if the functional data on these enzymes were unavailable. He advised us to start by engineering a bacterium that could perform the second half of the pathway using one the intermediates as feedstock. At the same time, we could design an efficient and sensitive method to control the
 
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<p>Some of the other tips he gave us included the use of monoculture rather than polyculture due to better mass transfer characteristics. He also introduced us to the concept of bioremediation, which would further enhance the environmental impact of our project.</p>
 
  
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Revision as of 15:52, 13 September 2018

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HEAR OUR STORY

We’re using synthetic biology to change the way the world thinks and functions.

We’re a little disruptive, dangerous and maybe a tad too bold. But the world needs some shaking up every now and then, and we think we’re just the right people for that.

Together we’re going to engineer biology and create something awesome.

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