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| - | <p><b>Discussions</b></p>
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| - | <p><a href="https://2012.igem.org/Team:Exeter/Collaborators#David Parker" style="color:#57B947"><u>David Parker</u></a> from <i>Shell</i> first introduced us to the business
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| - | considerations of our project and helped to shape our thoughts on where our project could go in the business sector. We discussed product yields, as the more polysaccharide
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| - | produced the more money we could make. Organisms use most of the sugar for themselves and would only produce about 1% of our desired polysaccharide. Bacteria are better as they
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| - | don’t have compartmentalisation, have faster growth and higher yield but how do you control their fermentation, considering antibiotics kill the host. We discussed alternative
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| - | methods of producing our polysaccharides including using the bacteria to instead produce the enzymes and isolating these.</p>
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| - | <br>
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| - | <p>David Parker also introduced us to marketing considerations, who our competitors would be and, since we don’t have any and are filling a niche, which would benefit from our
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| - | new technology. <b>David Ion</b> from a local food manufacturer discussed with us the business applications of our products to their industry but
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| - | pointed out the current difficulties of introducing GM products into food products. Their interest was primarily in the cholesterol reducing properties of cyclodextrin and we
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| - | considered how it might be possible to treat their food ingredients and then remove cyclodextrin so a GM product wasn’t in their final merchandise. Unfortunately we are a long
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| - | way off of using our products in the food industry due to the restrictions to GM products and the barriers to any food ingredient from a food safety aspect.</p>
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| - | <p>Professor Rick Titball and <b>Dr. Timothy Atkins</b> from <i>DSTL</i> met and discussed the vaccine application to our project. The benefits to producing polysaccharide
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| - | vaccines includes a reduced immune response to the adjuvant and also we are not introducing attenuated or dead bacteria and so people are unlikely to become ill from taking the
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| - | vaccine but are still protected against the disease. This improves upon current vaccines and also provides the opportunity to treat a wider range of diseases and improve public
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| - | health.</p>
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| - | <br>
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| - | <p>The meeting with <i>DSTL</i> led us to a discussion with <b>Dr. Andrew Watts</b>, head of <a href="http://www.glythera.com/" style="color:#57B947"><u>Glythera</u></a>, who
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| - | pointed out a technology in development that could improve upon our polysaccharide vaccines by binding to a protein they are developing that increases B cell activation 10,000
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| - | fold. This would improve the efficacy of our vaccines. He also pointed out to us that even though there weren’t enough promoters for the control of all our glycosyltranferases,
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| - | there is the opportunity of producing NOT and NOR gates to introduce more variability to expression or potential to look at more downstream expression effectors such as protein
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| - | modifications.</p>
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| - | <br>
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| - | <p>Our regular meetings with <a href="https://2012.igem.org/Team:Exeter/Collaborators#Sabina Leonelli" style="color:#57B947"><u>Dr. Sabina Leonelli</u></a> also highlighted the
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| - | ethical issues surrounding our iGEM project. Specifically, questions over data mis-use of our technology versus open source ethos of iGEM were raised as well as ethical issues
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| - | over human intervention of natural life-forms such as <i>E.coli</i> that we are using to build our technology.</p>
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| - | <br>
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| - | <p>Frequent meetings with <i>Greenpeace</i> with <a href="https://2012.igem.org/Team:Exeter/Collaborators#David Santillo" style="color:#57B947"><u>Dr. David Santillo</u></a> and
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| - | <a href="https://2012.igem.org/Team:Exeter/Collaborators#Janet Cotter" style="color:#57B947"><u>Dr. Janet Cotter</u></a> allowed us to adjust our project to minimise
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| - | environmental risks if our GMO and/or high-quality polysaccharide products were to be released into the environment. These issues were implemented both throughout this project
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| - | and beyond the iGEM competition.</p>
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| - | <br>
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| - | <p>The combination of discussions with professionals of their fields, the human practice panel held early on in our project and the continued development of our project
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| - | alongside human practice considerations has enabled us to consider all aspects of human practices concerned with our project. We have been able to develop human practices
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| - | alongside our project so they evolved together.</p>
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