Difference between revisions of "Team:XMU-China/Public Engagement"

This year our team XMU-China came to Xiamen Science and Technology Museum to advocate the synthetic biology and our project .The whole project about 3 parts, game, Poster and Wish Wall. First, the game part, children play the roles of antibody and antigen respectively, they battled to be the winner by RPS.After the game they all left a deep impression of the general method that our body fight with cancer. Second，Poster，we had some talkative teammates to take charge of this part, so many student from high school and primary school were attracted ,they crowded in front of the poster and listened to our announcers absorbedly. Finally, the Wish Wall part, after our diverse introductions about the synthetic biology, they had learn a lot about it, and some of them even inspire to give their contributions to synthetic biology, and want to attend the innovative, fantastic competition ——iGEM. It’s also a cheerful Day for our team to propagate the synthetic biology to so many children.

Fighting for Mooncake is a traditional activity spent with relatives or close friends in Xiamen area in order to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Throughout the game, we advertised the iGEM to freshmen, and introduced our project this year. It was worth mentioning that we also collected solicited opinions from all the students about the feasibility of our disease detective device and treatment device with cell-free system this year. 86.7% of participants showed positive attitudes towards our detective device, with the common sense of this device could performed pre-diagnosis quickly to guide patients. 66.8% students thought that it was difficult to treat tumors with vesicles, but it was very promising.

In order to popularize the common knowledge of biology to the public and meanwhile to draw the public attention to synthetic biology, this year we xmu-china team visited to Yanwu Elementary School, volunteering to teach elementary students biology, introducing our team and work, and directing them to do some simple biological experiments. For instance, we let them extract DNA from bananas.

In the course of our introduction, the children of Yanwu Primary school expressed their great enthusiasm, responded positively to our interaction, and moreover they showed terrific zest for our introduction. In these next simple experiments, the children were thrilled to be involved in one of the experiments.

In the end, through our teaching and guidance, most of the children have achieved remarkable results during the experiments. After the event, Yanwu Elementary school students said they learned a lot of useful knowledge, and very happy to do these interesting experiments by themselves within our guidance.

Also, the teachers feed back that they think this activity is so meaningful, extremely hoping to hold more such events in the primary school campus.

This year, team XMU-China developed new methods named ABCD System and OMVs Treatment for detecting and treating diseases. In order to prove the feasibility of our project, we consulted the Chief Physician Weiwei Tang in Medical Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Xiamen University, on August 23th. We introduced briefly the structure and function of our self-designed hardware Eye of Agamotto(EA) to Dr.Tang. During the talk, Dr.Tang appreciated it that our ideas are innovative and helpful. What’s more, Dr.Tang also told us those frequently-used and classical clinical detection methods, like ELISA, CLIA and so on. Most of which are time-consuming, expensive and complex, compared with EA. As for EA, Dr.Tang agreed with our proposals that we are going to make EA widely used among basic medical institutions, especially in remote, and poverty-stricken areas because of its convenient and practicability. But it’s worth noting that today there is an authoritative method for disease-diagnose, i.e., pathological diagnosis. So our detection method would just serves as a kind of screening tool rather than diagnosis method, according to Tang’s suggestion.

We visited Health Service Center of Datong Street, Tong’an District, Xiamen city. We learned about the development of tumor markers detection work in primary hospitals from director Zhan. We found that primary hospitals were mostly able to carry out screening of basic tumor markers such as alpha fetoprotein. If people want to carry out more systematic and specific tumor screening, they had to be referred to higher-level hospitals. In addition, due to the implementation effect of China's medical security system and Xiamen's health policy, the screening of tumor markers at the grassroots-level health center could save about 50% of the cost compared with the large hospitals. Therefore, to sum up, president Zhan affirmed the future prospects of our instruments, believing it would solve problems such as "difficult access to medical services" in real life, to better provide more convenient medical and health services.

This year, XMU-China designed a device that could be applied in cancer screening field by detecting biomarkers. We wondered if it would have a bright future in the IVD market，so we launched many Human Practices, including visiting specialists. Those specialists gave us some beneficial advice about the product-sale strategies, which was beneficial for our project’s further development. What’s more, we also visited the Community Health Service Center where our distributed devices could play an important role in testing the lab. See more in XMU-China_Enterprenureship.pdf.