Human Practice

Overview

In our human practice, we find previously, the turning rate of iGEM project into real market is not very high. As a medicine-based iGEM team, our aim is to bring the top-notch benchworks to the bedside. It’s not merely our mission but our desire to bridge the huge gap between them. In the first place, as a human health care oriented start, we seek to find more supports from medical doctors as we are dealing with a very controversial issue-to deliver peptide via our bacteria. We interview both the doctors and the patient, and ask what they think about our projects, and further ask for their kind opinions on whether our idea-PepDEX, using bacteria as an interactive vector to deliver small peptides to the specific site, can be applied to different disease modalities. Since our project-PepDEX provides a vivid, active vector and host interaction, which distinguish us from any other current regimens.

Secondly, most of the technological system development is from top to down, as we know a repertoire of techniques we own, and then we are able to separate them in to different branches. We try to come out more based on what we have. Simply put, we generate many sketches of future designs which are constrained within certain fields. And their integration is from top to down, which further sharpens specific techniques. However, when it comes to the real world, we usually find hard to transform these techniques into real practice, since we know and focus on the top-notch techniques first, not what our customers or audience really need. In our second part of human practice, we start as an evolutionary way of design, as medicine itself is highly associated with people, both the physician and the patients. We tried to know what kind of issues physician would face in clinics, and what their ideal solution is. Further we also collect interviews from our patients, as we try to know their needs. By doing this, we incorporate a human-centered way to look at these questions, and that is design thinking. In the following pages, we will share with you guys more about how we generate our projects using design thinking, and hope this can help more smart people and dedicated team to achieve more.