Integrated Practice
This year is a special year. In order to better respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19, we have adopted a new human practice mode of work compared to previous years to provide substantive assistance to the project in every aspect.
The team BIT focuses on combining the biological part and the hardware part, using microfluidic chips and other technologies for testing. Therefore, after the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, the team BIT also considered conducting related research to solve specific practical problems.
After thorough investigation, we have determined to make a highly accurate, simple and portable new coronavirus detection device, which should be able to help hospitals in communities, rural areas and other places as well as large-scale population detection and investigation. Therefore, we determined the target audience based on the characteristics of the project, conducted interviews and surveys with the target audience, and asked them their suggestions for our project.
Because front-line medical workers, community workers, volunteers, etc., as grass-roots workers, working in front-line medical, community and other scenarios will be the target audience of our project products in the future. Therefore, we have carried out research on them at the beginning of the project. Interview to get their opinions. The members of the BIT team conducted interviews in their hometowns, covering most parts of China.
The opinions we received are as follows:
1.We interviewed frontline medical staff, introduced our project to them, and listened to their opinions and suggestions. Through research, we learn that although the current nucleic acid testing time for the new coronavirus has been greatly shortened, it still takes a long time for first-line medical institutions to return from sampling to the return of results. If there is another large-scale outbreak, medical resources and isolation sites will all face risk of burden, leading to a safety hazard. At the same time, the operating cost of nucleic acid detection is very high, and the sensitivity and accuracy need to be improved. Interviewees consider the project we developed a portable detection device which will enhance the ability to detect a large number of sample in a short period, reduce the false probability of occurrence of negative, whch will help them to a large extent. Therefore, they look forward to our dual detection method for nucleic acid protein and the combination of microfluidic chip and smartphone applet. These information inform that our project can fill some of the current gaps and has huge market potential.
2. We spoke with community workers, they mentioned that during the epidemic prevention and control various positions in community lack labor force, many of the staff being quarantined lead to more intense work. After listening to our project introduction, they first expressed their concern about the difficulty of developing the device out of consideration of virus mutation, and also expressed full confidence and expectations for our project because the device can make nucleic acid detection in the community a reality, which will greatly reduce the pressure on medical staff and community workers, whether for global epidemic trend and epidemic prevention and control is of great significance.
3. We interviewed volunteers for epidemic prevention and control, and they said that they were deeply touched by the success and difficulties they encountered during their volunteer activities. They old us that there are still some families in some areas that cannot afford the cost of testing, and the current testing methods require high professionalism. If our project develops a portable device, it will greatly improve the testing efficiency and reduce the pressure on all aspects of society.
After fully collecting the opinions of the target audience, we also asked three experts, Deng Yulin, Lu Xuefei, and Li Xiaoqiong, to finalize our project. The three professors helped us think better about the technical details of the project and emphasized the importance of safety.
In the middle of our project, we participated in three meetings, namely: CCIC, iGEMer Meeting in Beijing, and virus Police --- From scouting to arresting (held by SMMU_CHINA) (the team has retired). In these three meetings, we received opinions from the CCIC judges and other teams. Everyone was very interested in the content of the hardware part mentioned in our project, especially the manual centrifugation part. These opinions are mainly concentrated here. Everyone is very concerned about whether this part is stable enough, whether it will cause leakage, etc. This also prompted us to conduct further research and experimental verification.
After relevant research and experimental verification, we did find that the problems mentioned in the manual centrifugation part did occur. Therefore, we further improved the project and finally determined the manual gyro as our new manual centrifugal equipment principle.
While upgrading and improving the project in the middle of the project, we hope to get more inspiration from research projects such as enterprises. Therefore, the BIT team took the opportunity of relevant courses to interview Capitalbio and learned about their latest achievements such as COVID-19 Mobile Laboratory. As mentioned in the mobile laboratory project of Capitalbio, testing is carried out through various automated equipment, which greatly reduces the work pressure of medical staff, and at the same time carries out data analysis and uploading through 5G means. The BIT team uses wechat to analyze and upload data. These projects of the Boao Group are inspired by the BIT team members. Through this interview and investigation, we have learned more about the characteristics of other products that face similar inspection scenarios with our projects, and provided us with a reference for continuing to improve our projects.
Not only that, we also introduced the newly improved items to the doctors we interviewed before, and revisited their suggestions. After they learned about our updated project, they still emphasized that they hope that the BIT team's project can do a better job in improving short-time large-scale detection capabilities, so it is very important to choose a better amplification method. Therefore, after a more in-depth understanding and receiving the guidance of expert Professor Lu Xuefei, we abandoned the original RPA amplification method and switched to HCR and PCR amplification methods to better meet the needs of the target audience.
Although a lot of human practice cannot be carried out smoothly due to the COVID-19, we have done a lot of work in the early and middle stages of the project through more various means to help us better establish the project, The improvement of the project has played an important role in the improvement of our project.
Created By Beijing Institute of Technology