Team:TecMonterrey GDL/Human Practices

Our project focused on a current problem that is not given due attention, depression and anxiety disorders. There is a large number of uninformed people on the subject, since many are barely aware of the symptoms or causes of a depressive or anxious disorder and due to the above, people tend to normalize these diseases by letting them pass indefinitely without giving them adequate treatment. In addition to developing a psychobiotic that can combat the adverse effects of stress that causes inflammation in the body and leads to depression or anxiety, the team wanted to take advantage of their intervention in the topic to help create awareness layers through social networks and thus promote the preventive culture and encourage people to ask for help when necessary.

On the other hand, several events were created in our community where experts on the subject were invited to give the public the opportunity to express their doubts and share their experiences. From our human practices and the feedback obtained from these, the goal of our project was shaped to become what it is now.

Initial contact with a professional

Disinformation. We wanted to break paradigms and establish a concrete mentality about the disease we wanted to attack with our project, understanding the patient.

Galilea 2000 A.C.

Informative speech about the “must know” on depression and anxiety. We should see the disease from the true eyes of a person with the disease.

Kurago Biotek

Not responsible. We thought that our product could be made working alone with E. coli, without considering the adverse effects that this could cause in people.

Panel with experts, stundents, and parents

Target. The panel helped us identify new groups of people vulnerable to these diseases, we adapted our product and market studies according to the new information recollected.

Science diffusion in elementary schools

A brief introductory class to elementary school kids on the basics of biotechnology, their applications and their daily usage. We thought that they wouldn’t have interest.

Meet-Up

Gathering with Latin-American teams, including all Mexico´s teams for feedback, collaborations and support, both professional and personal.

Collaboration with Dr. Rebecca L. Carrier

Contact with experts on the biological and molecular boundaries. Response. Gut-on-a-chip will provide a secure way to know Lactobachill has the desired effect.

Interview with a psychologist

A profound comprehension of myths , symptoms , and behavior of those who suffer from depression and anxiety from the professional point of view.Clearing doubts that emerged.

Living library experience

Intimate. The public is excited to live more closely cases of depression and anxiety of people who have already gone through it and overcome it willing to share it.

Movie Day

A fresh approach to youngsters about mental disorders presented as a romantic comedy to break stigmatization. Create an informed opinion about these diseases.

Collaborations with other teams

Shearing, supporting, understanding and acting on the active problems that other teams all around the globe, are currently attacking. Sharing our work and learning from others.

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Initial contact with a professional

Insights: Disinformation. We wanted to break paradigms and establish a concrete mentality about the disease we wanted to attack with our project, understanding the patient.

Changes:It was a start point to see from a new perspective patients that suffer from depression.

Resume:

The first activity of human practices we did as a team, was to request the support of a professional, this with the goal of commenting our ideas and asking him or her, to guide us in the process of being able to help people from all social sectors with our project. This is how the team visited psychologist Carmina Gudiño´s office, who provided us with reliable information about depression and anxiety disorders. She answered all the questions we had, as well as reviewed and approved all the material and information prepared for the human practices activities. She also gave us information about some established myths about depression and anxiety, and how these symptoms are sometimes normalized by society.

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Galilea 2000 A.C.

Insights: Lack of comprehension. We should see the disease from the true eyes of a person with the disease.

Changes:We develop a truthful motivation for helping people.

Resume:

This association, gives shelter and provide assistance to relatives of patients who are treated in a hospital near by the area of the institution. We considered this group as one with a higher possibility of suffering depression and anxiety, due to the environment they have to be, at the time their relatives suffer a specific type of illness. Because of this, we gave a lecture. Our objective was to generate awareness that both, depression and anxiety are diseases that need to be treated as such, otherwise they can have severe consequences of different type including suicide. On the lecture we gave basic information of the disease, as well as information of public and private institutions able to provide help and support.

At the beginning of the lecture we asked the persons to fill some questions, the questions were written on a cardboard and we gave them stickers, so the registry was their answer (since the questions were true or false). Throughout the talk the great majority of the assistants showed interest on the topic and on the information given, since they are in a vulnerable state we believe that it might be easier for them to understand the relevance of mental illnesses. At the end, we asked the people to answer the same questions as the beginning, to measure the impact of our presentation.

We considered this activity a potential success since the information was of great importance for those who are in need of help. W.H.O. has also recognized that the stigmatization of depression and lack of availability for treatment is still prevalent. In Mexico, mental illnesses continues to be a taboo, with the increasing depression events in the population, this sort of talks are necessary. Our plan is to keep pushing towards an open dialogue for depression.

More about Galilea:

This institution gives integral and humanitarian help to patients of a hospital named Hospital Civil de Guadalajara and their relatives. Help provided includes emotional, medical or nutritional, throughout programs intended to motivate people to improve their way of living. This non-profit organization received donations from the private sector, or people interested in maintaining the program active.

The organization has a partnership with Fray Antonio Alcalde shelter, which main characteristic is to help people from outside the state, who attend medical appointments at the hospital, or who have a relative in the hospital.

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Kurago Biotek

Insights: Not responsible. We thought that our product could be made working alone with E. coli, without considering the adverse effects that this could cause in people.

Changes:It was considered to test the strategy first in E. coli and later pass it to L. rhamnosus, a microorganism better accepted by humans.

Resume:

Our team went to the company Kurago Biotek, experts in cultures of beneficial and active living microorganisms along with nutrients, to talk with them and receive feedback on the initial strategy that we thought to carry out, which was to use E. coli bacteria for realization of our psychobiotic. The company advised us to use a well-known probiotic, such as L. rhamnosus, since its benefits have been well studied and its good acceptance by the human body is known. On the other hand, they advised us to use E. coli only to test our work before passing it on to L. rhamnosus since it would be easier to test its functioning first in E. coli.

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Panel with experts, students, and parents

Insights: Target. The panel helped us identify new groups of people vulnerable to these diseases, we adapted our product and market studies according to the new information recollected.

Changes:The community presented more interest not only on the topic, but in our project.

Resume:

The team decided to invite three expert psychologists in education, systemic family therapy and student affairs to a panel that aimed to talk about depression from an integral angle to the students, teachers and parents of our university. The event was held in the congress center of our university and was planned based on the idea of a coffee talk. At the beginning of the event the project of our team was presented and a brief introduction of the event was given to put in context those present. Subsequently, the experts talked about definitions, myths, truths and situations in particular of depression and anxiety. Finally, there was a time for attendees to express their doubts or share their experiences. From this event, we realized that depression not only affects people with low economic resources, who have had some loss or suffer from another serious illness, but that all those exposed to stress become vulnerable to develop a disorder depressed or anxious, like students. This helped us along with our market studies to define the audience to which our product would be directed.

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Science diffusion in elementary schools

Insights: Appeal. We thought that they wouldn’t be interested on the topics.

Changes:We learned that science is more present in our community than what we thought.

Resume:

Our team made a presentation with basic concepts from biology, microbiology, biotechnology, sustainable development, industry, applications of biotechnology, its origins and examples in our daily basis. We contacted a secondary school called: “Escuela Secundaria José Arreola”; the administratives of the school allowed us to give the informative activity to third and second grades alumni. The school has two schedules, it has different groups in the morning and in the afternoon, we attended both turns. After the chat was finished we proceeded organize a jeopardy for the teenagers to play, we divided the alumni into four groups, we gave each group a chance to pick a category: biotechnology, microbiology & biology, daily life and sustainable development. At the very end, we awarded the teams with candies equivalent to the points they had earned. We received a very positive response from the students, and the director invited us to return in the next school period.

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Meet-Up

Insights: Constructive criticism. Exchange experience with other teams.

Changes:We had to rethink our strategy of communication of the project and study more about the topic.

Resume:

Our team attended the event organized by our university but on another campus, to present our project to teachers who gave us feedback. This gave us the opportunity to know the projects of other Latin American teams and at the same time to know our areas of opportunity for improvement based on the criticism and observations of the judges. The judges made us reconsider the side effects of our product and how we could do to prevent them from being negative.

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Collaboration with Dr. Rebecca L. Carrier

Insights: Response. Gut-on-a-chip will provide a secure way to know Lactobachill has the desired effect.

Changes:The way to test our L. rhamnosus construct.

Resume:

Our University will work in collaboration with the Northeastern University through Dr. Rebecca Carrier, a professor of chemical engineering, who will collaborate with our team to specifically assist in the introduction of our Lactobachill product in a gut-on-a-chip system with the intention of characterize how the product interacts with said system and especially how it modulates the immune response in a competent immune model.

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Interview with a psycologist

Insights: Improvement. To clear the doubts that emerge during the realization of the project

Changes:New perspective of the project.

Resume:

The team decided to interview another psychologist, to upload videos of segments of the interview to our social networks and in that way share it with our followers and general public. Also, in addition to asking about common things about depression and anxiety disorders, we decided to ask about things that have to do with the neurological aspect of mental illnesses, as well as their most common treatments through drugs and adverse effects.

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Living library experience

Insights: Intimate. The public is excited to live more closely cases of depression and anxiety of people who have already gone through it and overcome it willing to share it.

Changes:We consider listening more closely to those suffering from depression or anxiety to know more about the needs that our project must cover in its entirety.

Resume:

The living library is way of showing those who might be scared to share with others that they are depressed or even as encouraging them to accept their disease. This is a powerful of way of demonstrating the community that depression and anxiety are common diseases and that we must not be ashamed of suffering these illnesses thus we expect to create a digital space where people who go to this experience are comfortable enough to seek help and raise their voice.

Also there are still some people who believe that depression is just something that happens in movies, so via this experience we want to prove the relevance of mental health.

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Movie Day

Insights: Conscience. That people would create an informed opinion about these diseases.

Changes: we discovered that many of the students in our school are more interested in the subject if it is explained graphically, so we decided that developing more videos would help us to get our message to the public in a better way, since we are very visual.

Resume:

Similar to other events we expect to project a movie, sometimes documentaries can get boring and tedious, so what we aim to show is a movie that has all the elements of what depression and anxiety are, also the consequences of not seeking help, how to encourage someone to seek help. Our main objective is to show in a way where people can get to experience what depression from another point of view. We intend for this event to be appealing all of the alumni of our campus.

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Collaborations with other teams

Insights: Excitement, sharing our work and learn from the work of other is awesome.

Changes:Seek counseling help with other teams and advise other teams as well.

Resume:

We are really excited to collaborate with other iGem teams around the world; we developed a dynamic where we asked other teams to take a photograph of a touristic monument and add an special hashtag.

We also collaborated with iGem teams, like TEC CEM 2018, NYU Abu Dhabi, Endophyte Club, Bulgaria 2018, Team ICT Mumbai, iGEM Bordeaux, iGEM Toronto, Team Stony Brook, Team UChile_Biotec, iGEM Thessaloniki, IIT Kanpur, Bielefeld 2018, iGEM SKLMT-China, iGEM team UC San Diego - epinoma, CUNY Kingsborough.

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