Team:RDFZ-China/Implementation

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Proposed implementation

The proposed end users of Tea-HEE are patients & doctors who prescribe them. Our purpose of Tea-HEE is to produce 5-HTP in intestine to alleviate depression and to reduce the patients' resistive emotion when taking traditional medicine. More specifically, our project is believed to work the best for mild depression patients. According to the interview with psychotherapist Rae Yang, patients with mild depression are more fit for using some self-regulation methods since they are not necessary to be treated using drugs. Other methods like counseling might not be effective as the condition worsen. Therefore, our project can serve as an alternative therapy for treating mild depression and can reduce their chance of developing into severe depression.

For the safety of our patients, we plan to use E.coli Nissle 1917 as our final container of our circuit. In the next year, we plan to reach out to more practical approaches. Considering the way we send our bacteria into the gut and make them survive, we intend to develop hardware and mechanisms the best for patients' safety. Our current plan is to build a set of bacteria-based air sensitive capsules that delivers our engineered bacteria to to intestine and release them. They will then secrete adhesion molecules to attach to the lumen, and will fall off after a long period of time and commit suicide as soon as they leave the intestine. We are already considering some of the risks and uncertainties of this plan, for example, multiple kinds of native intestinal bacteria may be influenced by our implanted bacteria. The whole process and the materials involved will be thoroughly designed when we put this outlook into practice.

We also intend to realize and further develop this design of Tea-HEE, so that when our therapy is developed enough, doctors can work with patients to customize the "control system" that gives the appropriate amount of medicine, according to multiple factors of the patients' personal condition, like the flora in the intestine and their preference for drinking tea.

Most importantly, we found our food based external control system especially appealing. We see huge prospect for replacing TPH1 in our pathway with practically any other bio-brick to help with other intestine based health problems. Besides depression, we hope the mechanism Tea-HEE explored can have a wider application on other problems. To implement our design to a wider range, we have to reduce the safety risks. We plan to design and construct a suicide system that avoids leakage and other health issues. We also want to manage the effects of the engineered bacteria on the gut microflora, all for the safety of our potential users.