Team:AFCM-Egypt/Collaborations
Collaborations
It is quite captivating to observe what other iGEM teams are achieving in their projects and how they are carrying out different tasks. It is essential to congregate this wide variety of ideas from bright and imaginative people in a single place. Here are the teams that we had the pleasure of working with this year
iGEM African Meetup
Being one of the pioneering iGEM teams in Africa, we have always wanted to connect iGEMers from our region. In previous iGEM seasons, this seemed to be difficult as we had always envisioned that meetups should take place in a face-to-face setting. This year, COVID-19 taught us that physical distance is not a barrier to communication. Hence, we decided to organize the first ever African meetup in order to share our ideas and progress with other African teams, to know how well other teams are performing and to develop our projects on a wider scale. We wanted to further foster the development of a strong and cohesive SynBio community in our region, so we opened up the registration to African iGEMers, AfteriGEMers and SynBio enthusiasts. Over the course of the meetup, a number of talks and presentations were carried out as an aid for African teams to overcome their faced obstacles and for the development of new skills.
The meetup was held on the 16th of october 2020, it was an online meeting divided into three main parts. The first part consisted of 3 presentations by Dr. Mohamed Salama ,
associate professor at the institute of Global Health and Human Ecology, the American University in Cairo who talked about precision medicine in neurodegenerative diseases, another presentation by Dr. Andrea Savarino
professeur of Infectious Diseases at National Institute of Health(ISS) in Italy, explaining the use of dendritic cells in vaccine formation and ended by a story of an African bioventure, an entrepreneurship journey as after iGEMers who translated their synthetic biology project into therapeutic products by Mohamed Tarek (CTO) and Mahmoud Abdelgawad (CEO) both Igem 2020 judges.
The second part of the meetup was exclusively reserved for the presentations of the three African teams. AUC- EGYPT and AFCM-Egypt are both aiming to develop therapeutic approaches to fighting breast cancer and COVID-19 respectively. Asheshi-Ghana set out to clear the crises that faces our coasts and explained how they developed an environmental approach to fighting plastic wastes and saving the coasts using Synbio.
The final part involved consultation of African ambassadors Nana Oye Djan and Alex Kyabarongo
who reflected what would happen next after the iGEM competition because many team members are oblivious to that issue. That was followed by a committee member talk held out by Yasser Ayman and Mohamed Osama both AfteriGEMers and present advisors, they passed on their experiences regarding video and remote technology, they also shared ideas with teams depicting ways to work out the virtual Giant Jamboree event which turned out very lucrative for team members.
In winding up the meetup, a few minutes were assigned for the SynFair winning team which is mainly a group of bright minded high school students, they were given the chance to demonstrate their project against Alzeheimer disease. Finally, a warm campfire talk took place during which the attendees discussed the future prospectives regarding Synbiotic trends and the use of Synbio to advance in bioeconomies in different regions of Africa.
iGEM RUM and TUDelft
As we wanted to get to know how other teams work and getting feedback from them through scientific communication, we accepted invitations from teams RUM and TUDelft to make videos regarding their projects. With team RUM, the video was mainly addressing environmental problems as how plastic wasted could affect marine life. With team TUDelft we made another video discussing how different teams are dealing with the exceptional year of covid-19.
GW-university
In order to prove our team's art and design efficieny we decided to help team George Washington in designing their logo.
UCPH
Since we greatly value teaching, we consider it an essential part of the learning process. Hence, we created a simplified presentation in the form of a story using heavily illustrated pictures, animations and clear vocabulary to teach kids basics of Synbio. We also translated that story in simple arabic words to make sure that all egyptian (arab) students would be able to comprehend it.
MIT
With team MIT our collaborations took more than one form. Out of the need for more knowledge we attended the MIT meet up where experts in the field of Synbio including Dr. Pranam, Dr. Noureen Wauford, and Dr, Ron Weiss explained basics of Synbio to the audience. Furthermore, we participated in the MIT graphical abstract designing competition to test our performance in comparison to other teams.
AUC-EGYPT
We were priveleged to partner with team AUC-EGYPT through the iGEM season, we mentored them in preparing their mathematical models and optimizing their circuit design, bioentrepreneurship was specially challenging for our new members and that’s why we are very grateful for to the AUC-EGYPT team for guiding us through the process of creating a business model for our immunotherapy.
Make-Them-Smile
IGEM has always stood for not only science and research but also for inspiration, motivation and enthusiasm. It is the unique way that IGEM presents solutions for the world that makes it outstanding
As we know, depression is a tax that most cancer patients have to pay and it is of no need to mention that depression reached its climax during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since we are designing a vaccine for breast cancer this year, we decided to help cancer patients with more than just treating their diseases. The idea is simple; smiles are contagious. Nothing can show sympathy and gratitude like a faithful smile; that is reason we decided to start our collaboration Make Them Smile.
The collaboration is basically gathering videos and motivations from various IGEM teams from all around the globe and sharing them with patients who fight cancer everyday to show them how grateful we are for having them around. Teams who'd like to share just had to make short videos in any language and send them to our team.
WIE INSAT organization
Since our project's aim was mainly fighting breast cancer, one of our utmost priorities was to spread awareness to the largest number of audience possible in order to prevent the disease occurrence in the first place. Hence, making use of her presence in Tunisia, one of our team members conducted a collaboration with the WIE INSAT organization, the largest international professional organization dedicated to promoting women engineers and scientists, whom we consider as our partners since we started working on breast cancer. Hand in hand, AFCM-Egypt and WIE INSAT organisation carried out several awareness events that took place mostly during November, the breast cancer awareness month. We used media to enforce our cause by creating an awareness video depicting risk factors and preventive methods in a very simple way, the video was later posted on both teams' facebook pages and came out very handy as many people attended and were responsive.