Team:AFCM-Egypt/Human Practices
Human Practices
Human practices has always been an integral part of our iGEM projects, this year was no different. At the beginning of the season, we had in mind various activities that required gatherings, but when COVID-19 hit the world, we had to quickly switch our agenda. We relied on our meetings with public health experts to identify the problem we wanted to tackle. Afterwards, we decided that we wanted to pay attention to two major axes; the psychological aspect of BC and spreading awareness. We met with cancer survivors and prominent media figures to learn more about the experience of being a cancer patient and the role the media plays in spreading awareness. We incorporated info from these meetings as well as our surveys into designing a brochure in both Arabic and English. We also participated in a breast cancer awareness campaign in Tunisia. As for our scientific part, we touched base with different experts at different time points of our project and incorporated their feedback into our design. Scroll down to learn more about all the communities and resources we consulted for our human practices and integrated human practices this year…
Doctor Wagida Anwar
AFCM has been participating in iGEM for four years now and cancer has always been our topic of interest; however, choosing an exact type of cancer to explore was never the easiest part. To make this task easier, our team consults renowned experts in different fields of study to help spot the right targets. Our main goal was to pick the right cancer that has a great impact on our Egyptian society.
So, this year we turned to one of our well known references, Dr. Wagida Anwar, our research head of department and a public health professor at Ain Shams University. With Dr. Anwar, we discussed the incidence of different types of cancers and the possible groups that could benefit from our research. Dr. Anwar did not only discuss the scientific aspects of the diseases, but also shed the light on the social and ethical aspects of some specific cancers. For instance, she urged us to choose a topic that can literally affect every Egyptian household. "Both adult female population and breast cancer rates are rising", she said. Hence, came our conclusion of designing a new SynBio-based vaccine for triple negative breast cancer.
Dr. Anwar also helped us prioritize our human practices by emphasizing the importance of education and raising public awareness against breast cancer which in return could increase the incidence of early detection and cure rate.
Mrs. Nashwa El Hoofy
Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, the role of the media has been highlighted in a way we never saw before. For this reason, we wanted to shed light on how the media can affect science and diseases and the way they are presented to the public; and we knew just the right person for this task. Mrs. Nashwa El Hofy is an eminent TV presenter and writer who is well known for her methodologies of presenting ideas to the public. She is a member of the national council of women as well.
We took a large step towards understanding the media role in spreading the awareness by interviewing her about the topic from a non-scientific point of view, which helped us widen our audience perspective and approach the general population in an easy, unsophisticated manner. For instance, she discussed Baheya Foundation’s campaign for early detection of breast cancer as a perfect example of using media and advertisement to advocate science. She explained how Baheya used "8" as its distinct figure. "8" represents the 8 out of 10 chance that a woman can get breast cancer. So Baheya decided to use the eight eights to be their universal fundraising account to show correlate the act of donation with a relevant piece of information that all women should be aware of.
Mrs. El Hofy also discussed different ways to reach our target audience especially in the time of COVID-19 and how the media could be crucial in preventing breast cancer and even treating it. She added that actors and public figures who appear more often on TV and advertisements about the Egyptian National Cancer Institute help elaborate the disease and spread awareness about the issue, both medically and socially. This greatly added to our work, as Dr. Maha Noor is a well-known cancer "hero", as she like to be called, who greatly added up to the integrity of our project.
Maha Nour
Bearing in mind the psychological trauma that breast cancer holds out to its patients, we wanted to understand more about the psychological journey that patients experience so we turned to Maha Nour's dazzling story against breast cancer. We met with her on various occasions and began to collaborate with her nonprofit organisation " Sehr El Hayah" that aims to provide support for breast cancer patients. She also taught us that we should be calling them breast cancer "heroes" rather than survivors or fighters because this term excludes the possibility of losing. Once you are a hero you are a winner regardless the results.
Her story put us on the track to calling upon 30%, a civil group dedicated to combating breast cancer with psychological support. Our meetings with both organisations guided us in designing our booklet, FB awareness campaigns, and our collaborations as well. We were so moved to the point that one of our female team members donated her hair to the cause.
The electronic survey
It is true that knowledge is power and awareness about a disease greatly affects the results, we became eager to find out more about our poapulation's power and knowledge to get an idea about how people are coping with such a prevalent disease. Hence, we chose to form a survey and collect information from a variety of females, some of which have encountered breast cancer before and others have not. Our surveillance technique was mainly an electronic online survey which allowed us to gather the required information both cheaply and anonymously and yet without any means of human interaction. The survey was presented in two languages, English and Arabic, the nost commonly spoken languages of our country. It amounts to a total of 38 questions divided into 5 different sections in which the surveyed subjects submit data about their demographic information and their knowledge about self and clinical breast examination. The survey was IRB approved.
Responders were informed that the survey is mainly conducted to help prevent breast cancer and fortunately our subjects were very interested in the matter and we received loads of answers and information that was later incorprated into several entities of the project and based on that information , we were guided to design the awareness booklet, facebook campaign and other videos used for different collaborations.
The Booklet
Throughout the year, as we came to know that prevention was way better than cure, specially that cure wasn’t that simple of a task as it had to be achieved both physically and psychologically. Our human practices work was mostly devoted to reaching out to more and more "heroes" who are on the ledge of facing trouble. So besides our electronic campaigns and virtual events, we designed a booklet that could be distributed to younger females and students living in remote areas and to those who may not have internet access. The booklet was useful because we included data regarding risk factors and preventive methods collected from the survey into it. Most of the advice presented were simple yet effective tips and daily life style changes that any regular person could easily do to significantly reduce the probability of getting the disease. And to reach out to more and more audience we decided to make the booklet in both languages english and arabic as well. In addition, we also used heavily illustrated pictures and animations to make sure that more people recieve our message.
Integrated Human Practices
Dr. Noureen Wauford
Dr. Noureen from MIT and Co-author of PERSIST While we were carrying out a collaboration with team MIT, our team attended the online MIT iGEM meetup that they conducted. At that point we were creating a preliminary design for the ON switch of our vaccine so we were fortunate to know Dr. Wauford in that meetup where she presented her platform and explained how she created PERSIST.
Hence, we reached out to her and sought her advice regarding our switch's performance. Dr. Wauford shed the light on the importance of studying the cellular clearance of the replicon vector issue of immunity evasion that we were missing out on and informed us that the circuit could completely break even before the replication process starts due to the auto-immune response that could take place. As a result, we started using her PERSIST to design an OFF modular switch that contains a NOR gate as well as GLY/ALA repeats which allowed our circuit to evade innate immunty responses by controlling its inhibitors.
Dr. Pranam Chatterjee
Among the merits we had through attending the MIT iGEM global meetup we got the chance to meet Dr. Pranam during the lecture he presented regarding the implication of the principles of synthetic biology in modern studies, accordingly we reached out to ask him few questions about our project and he pointed out some issues that needed improvement and re-assessment, including:
- Mathematical modeling of our vaccine design through antigen presentation difference between the use of replicons and without them before and after the introduction of the RNA replicons in the vaccine circuit.
- Experimental design through better evaluation of the antigenic epitopes we selected for our circuit as he highlighted the importance of validating each of these epitopes through comparing them with previous in-vitro and clinical studies
- Finding new ways of enhancing delivery.