Team:Grenoble-Alpes/actors partnerships

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ACTORS AND PARTNERSHIPS

We discussed with a lot of people to develop our project, to better understand what is useful to implement, create and integrate into our project from their remarks.

GROUND FLOOR: We established partnerships with local companies like Biomérieux and local laboratories like TIMC in order to benefit from their advice/expertise and we had the opportunity to get some of their biological material. Our engineers and researcher partners gave us a lot of recommendations all along the summer and helped us to get an external point of view on our project.

FIRST FLOOR: We visited a medical analysis laboratory and we met the laboratory manager. We discussed with him about the detection system used in his laboratory and about the advantages and limits of our system, if it was used in this kind of laboratory.

SECOND FLOOR: We met with doctors and patients who talked with us about bacteriophages and antibiotic resistance. We discussed with them to know if our detection system could be used in hospitals and what modification we should make in order to improve it. You can have a look at them on the third floor (see our schematic below).

THIRD FLOOR: All the societies must be implicated in our project. But it’s /essential for us to be aware of what people know about phage therapy and antimicrobial resistance. It’s important to evaluate people's knowledge and then produce an appropriate outreach.

center>CLICK ON THE PEOPLE YOU WANT TO HEAR FROM ! Everybody has something interesting to share with you.






GROUND FLOOR:




FIRST FLOOR:




SECOND FLOOR:



INTERVIEW WITH PR. MAX MAURIN



Dr. Max Maurin notes that in the last few years, he had to face new therapeutic dead-ends caused by the antibiotic resistance that did not exist before. The issue of antibiotic resistance is, in fact, a major issue that we should urgently address. Pseudomonas is a pathogen that he encounters quite often in his department. It is not too virulent but it has numerous resistance mechanisms. According to Dr. Maurin, phage therapy is a very interesting alternative even if it arises some ethical unsolved issues and can also cause a resistance of the bacteria toward phages. The use of bacteriophages in a medical establishment seems feasible because a few years ago, viruses were already used in the biological laboratory of hospitals.

Overall, Dr. Maurin thinks that our system is very interesting and answers well the given problem. However, some biological risks have to be taken into account such as the dissemination of the system components. If these aspects are well evaluated and handled, the system is very promising. Yet, Dr. Morin thinks that it will be very difficult to play on the sensitivity and the specificity of our system to compete with today’s methods in molecular biology. Among all the different specificities of our system, it is mostly the bacteriophages selection that caught his attention the most.

At last, Dr. Morin thinks that physicians do not have enough ethical formations and are not aware enough of new bioethical laws.


Read the interview with Pr. Max Maurin

Can you present yourself ? Is it okay to take a picture of you ?

Yes. Originally a medical doctor, I chose to pursue an internship in medical biology with a specialization in microbiology. I also did a Master and a thesis in a university hospital (double degree)? After my internship, I was an assistant in the university hospital then I became master of conferences and practitioner at the hospital. Nowadays, I am in charge of the bacteriology department in the Grenoble UHC.


Did you know iGEM before I told you about it?

Not in the details but I have already heard about it thanks to my colleagues (some of them even helped the previous Grenoble iGEM team).


Do you often encounter antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your department?




INTERVIEW WITH PR. OLIVIER EPAULARD



Each day, Pr. Olivier Epaulard is confronted with patients suffering from diseases caused by resistant bacteria. According to him, a misuse of antibiotics is the cause of 90% of the resistances and one antibiotic treatment out of two is wrongly prescribed. The number of antibiotic resistances does not cease to grow, like the number of immunosuppressed patients. Therefore, antibiotic resistance is a major issue of our century. Pseudomonas is also a pathogen that he encounters quite often in his department. Pr. Epaulard cannot make up his mind on the subject of phage therapy because he does not understand why it is not more developed. The positive aspect of this alternative is that bacteriophages destroy all bacteria - even the inactive ones -, something that antibiotics cannot do. According to him, the use of bacteriophages inside his department would not cause any issue.

Pr. Epaulard thinks that the project is very interesting. He is not overly passionate about the identification aspect but rather by the therapy aspect of the project. The diagnostic tools he uses have already very good specificity and sensitivity. It is going to be hard to compete with them. He verified many aspects of the biology in the system and was pleased with our answers.

Pr. Epaulard thinks that one can learn about bioethics through practice. Therefore, there is no need for more theoretical courses on ethics in a physician formation.




THIRD FLOOR: