Team:AFCM-Egypt/Partnership
Partnership
AUC-EGYPT: iGEM Newcomers
AUC-EGYPT: iGEM Newcomers Every year, we try our best to support new iGEM teams. In our previous participations in the competition, we helped organize iGEM Bootcamps and information sessions. With our many participations in the competition, we’re no strangers to having new teams reach out to us and ask for help and guidance about joining iGEM. This year, however, things were different. AUC-EGYPT reached out to us and we decided to turn our collaborations into partnerships in various aspects of both our projects. AUC’s team is a multidisciplinary one and we sought their guidance on various aspects of our project as well as offered them our experience as a biology-only team in the competition.
Throughout the season, we held many meetings where we helped each other innavigating various challenges in the competition, we had many meetings where wechecked in on each other’s progress and gave each other hints and pointers on howto proceed. AUC’s team had just begun learning about modeling in a biology contextand we were very nascent in the field of bioentrepreneurship so they helped us withit.
Turning the SynFair into an interactive game
With COVID-19, we quickly learned that having the SynFair in a face-to-face formatis not optimal. We were thrilled when the AUC team suggested that they could helpby turning our materials into an interactive SynBio game. This endeavor would alsostrongly help us in future iterations of the SynFair activity as we would be able todeliver our content to an even wider base of students. Two of our team members,Ahmed Adel and Ahmed Wael met with their Biology team (Salma Abou Elhassan,Rana Salah and Ahmed Magdy) and provided them with our educational content.Our teams worked together to turn this content into a set of engaging games andactivities. Dalia Waleed, their skilled game developper then worked using Unity onstringing together the game: Mission Luciferin. Mission Luciferin follows theadventures of a family of fireflies on a quest to get their daughter firefly to light upagain. On their journey, they enter a SynBio Lab and learn all about how to designcircuits and use them. The game was showcased in our virtual SynFair and washeavily praised.
Modeling
Back in June Ahmed Gamal and Mohamed Tarek, from our team, met with NorhanMokhtar and Ahmed Magdy responsible for modeling within their project. Weintroduced them to the various modeling techniques they could use and how tocreate mathematical models that would be useful in a therapeutic context. Afterthat, we regularly checked in with updates of their work progress andtroubleshooted various hurdles in their models including but not limited toparameter selection, equation formulation and data plotting. In a later check-in, wenoticed that they were sketching MATLAB codes from scratch and recommendedthat they use MATLAB’s SynBiology software for their models.
Entrepreneurship
During our first preliminary meetings with AUC, we told them that we had alwayswanted to explore the entrepreneurial potential of their iGEM projects. We had beenparticipating in the competition for four years conceptualizing cancer therapies buthad never actually begun to create a business model for a therapeutic solution. Ouronly currently available business model is for custommune, a software tool forhotspot identification and epitope prediction. Muhammad Hasan and Sawsan Ali,two team members from AUC who have experience in preparing business modelsworked closely with Saif Wahba and Aly Morsy to plan our model.
Together we began exploring the current regulatory framework in Egypt for therapyfor therapies utilizing SynBio, they helped us identify the unmet needs and our UVP,look into potential stakeholders and identify the challenges and potential hurdles wemight encounter in the real world implementation of our project.