Team:AUC-EGYPT/Partnership
Partnership: leveraging resources in a resource-limited setting
Early in the season when we started to prepare for the competition, we realized that there were so many aspects that we needed help in navigating. Our team is a multidisciplinary one with members from Computer Science, Engineering, Actuarial Sciences and of course biology. However, the nature of the competition was so unique that we needed guidance navigating it.
We knew that AFCM has been Africa’s longest standing team in the competition, yet we also knew that they are a medical college and thus may also need help in navigating non-biology components of iGEM. The fact that both of our teams are based in Egypt gave us a boost to pursue a partnership with them.
Throughout the season, we held many meetings where both teams helped each other in navigating various challenges in the competition starting from modeling, entrepreneurship and education all the way to networking and hosting mutual feedback sessions. In our feedback sessions, we would each present our current progress and identify strengths and weaknesses as well as next steps. Two of AFCM's instructors actually dedicated their time with us as advisors following us along each step of the way.
Mission Luciferin: an interactive twist on the AFCM-SynFair
This year, we wanted to focus strongly on science communication and education as a part of our core values and social responsibility. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we wanted to build on already existing resources that were tried and true. During our early meetings with AFCM, we learned that they had an activity called the SynFair where they host students from all over the country in their campus for SynBio educational workshops. As COVID-19 precautions also caused their campus to close, they had begun to consider the challenges of having their SynFair activity be a face-to-face interaction. During one of our regular meetings, we came up with the idea of turning their educational content into an interactive app that they could deploy to school children. This endeavor would also strongly help them in future iterations of the SynFair activity as they would be able to deliver their content to an even wider base of students. Two of their team members, Ahmed Adel and Ahmed Wael met with our Biology team (Salma Abou Elhassan, Rana Salah and Ahmed Magdy) and provided us with their educational content. Our teams worked together to turn this content into a set of engaging games and activities. Our awesome game developer, Dalia Waleed, then worked using Unity on stringing together the game: Mission Luciferin. Mission Luciferin follows the adventures of a family of fireflies on a quest to get their daughter firefly to light up again. On their journey, they enter a SynBio Lab and learn all about how to design circuits and use them. The game was showcased in AFCM’s virtual SynFair and was heavily praised.
Modeling
Early on in our project, we knew that due to our campus closure and restricted access to the lab we needed to count heavily on various modeling and simulation techniques to evaluate our design. Our team members had strong mathematical backgrounds, yet we still needed help in applying this background in a biological setting. Once we had settled on using toehold switches, we realized that we needed to perform extensive structural modeling and to have a go at modeling the kinetics of our circuit. Back in June we met with Ahmed Gamal and Mohamed Tarek, 2 AFCM iGEMers responsible for modeling within their project. They began helping us by introducing us to the various modeling techniques we could use and how to create mathematical models that would be useful in a therapeutic context. After that, we regularly checked in with updates of our work progress and troubleshooted various hurdles in our models including but not limited to parameter selection, equation formulation and data plotting. In a later check-in, they noticed that we were sketching MATLAB codes from scratch and recommended that we use MATLAB’s SynBiology software for our models.
Entrepreneurship
During our first preliminary meetings with AFCM, we learned from them that they had always wanted to explore the entrepreneurial potential of their iGEM projects. They had been participating in the competition for four years conceptualizing cancer therapies but had never actually begun to create a business model for a therapeutic solution. Their only currently available business model was for custommune, a software tool for hotspot identification and epitope prediction. Our team includes Muhammad Hasan and Sawsan Ali, two team members from who have experience in preparing business models both our team members worked closely with Saif Wahba and Aly Morsy, 2 AFCM team members tasked with working on the business model.
Together we began exploring the current regulatory framework in Egypt for therapy for therapies utilizing SynBio, we helped them identify the unmet needs and their UVP, look into potential stakeholders and identify the challenges and potential hurdles they might encounter in the real world implementation of their project.