At A Glance

This year, we have disseminated two worldwide health problems: heart attacks and strokes, and its possible clinical solutions. Due to their complexities as well as components of mechanisms and treatments, our project poses a broad perspective and approach together with our policy & practices activities.

Here, you can take a look at the main components of our project design.

The Problem

Ischemia is the restriction of blood supply to tissues, generally caused by the blockage of a clot due to the reduction or inhibition of blood flow. This process results in the shortage of oxygen and nutrition vital for metabolism and survival of cells. Since oxygen is delivered to tissues only via the blood, insufficient blood supply cause tissue cells to starve. Especially for the heart and brain, irreversible damage is highly likely to  occur in as little as 3–4 minutes at body temperature.

Ischemia is related to the most serious conditions of today's medical problems. The well-known heart attack, which is responsible for most of the deaths worldwide, is actually an ischemic condition. In addition to this, the loss of a specific region of the brain because of poor blood perfusion is associated with ischemia too and is famously known as stroke. In fact, every year, about 1.5 million Americans have heart attack causing 500,000 deaths. A heart attack occurs every 20 seconds which results in a death approximately every minute.

As it can be assumed, one treatment of ischemia  is removing the blockage. However, this has the possibility of making the situation more chaotic. Today, it is possible to dissolve the clot ingredients with specific medications. However, adapted tissue to hypoxic media can be poisoned from oxygen. The absence of oxygen and nutrients from blood during the ischemic period creates a condition in which the restoration of circulation results in inflammation and oxidative damage due to the induction of oxidative stress rather than restoration of normal function.

This new state may cause some unwilling reactions which have the ability to produce toxic chemicals called reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS are some oxygen intermediate products which have an absence of one electron in their covalent bonds. This makes them ultimately undetermined. By means of this, ROS can disrupt almost every cellular structure including DNA, cell membrane and organelles. Because of the nature of ischemic conditions, the final solution should include the restoration of every negative outcome due to ischemia.

Our Approach

Our project design aims on two distinct situations. The more we delve into the entire condition, the more we reach a definite cure for ischemia. For this reason, we intend to use our vessel cells as a way to to get in action in time to heal or prevent the consequences of ischemia. To do this, we have to sense hypoxic conditions, prevent or remove clot formation and oxidative stress factors.

Regarding the need of an efficient, cost effective and rapid treatment option, we have divided our approach into modules: Detection devices and activist proteins. We want to detect hypoxia in two levels; a promoter device in gene level and a protein domain allowing protein level regulation. We also aim to sense the oxidant factors in media to empower sensor devices. Afterwards, these devices will produce our activist proteins which are clot dissolving agents, antioxidant enzymes and proteins. We are hoping to propose a novel approach which reacts in early periods, intervene powerfully and prevent recurrence of such an attack effectively.

Future Aspects

Gene therapy and tissue engineering are two different, but promising fields which relate to our project. We have discussed the advantages and possible side effects, ethical or social issues of these fields  to determine which of these would benefit best.

Additionally, we have designed an applicative version of our project design, its possible clinical use from a clinician’s perspective and a patient’s view.

Last, but not the least, we aim to feature a computer modelling data to predict potential effects of our treatment and if it can be used as a preventive medication. We envision that our system will detect hypoxia before reaching the mortal levels and interfere to prevent more serious conditions without raising awareness on the patient who receivs this treatment.

Achievements

•We successfully propose a promising, novel approach and system design to treat ischemia, a common and lethal public health issue.

•???

Policy & Practices

Apart from our project design, we also want to intensify our approach on ischemic conditions and diseases by working on human practices and social issues. This year, we preferred to conduct an inclusive perspective and activity to address every aspect and all the stakeholders related with this issue. Therefore, we separated our P&P design into four columns; all of them show a respective process and interactive strategy.

First, we need to analyze how big the problem is and how common these ischemic diseases are among people, especially in the iGEM community. The name of this module is “Identification”; with the intention of “identifying” the parameters of the problem, in order to solve the source of the matter efficiently.

Afterwards, we aim to carry out some tasks to raise awareness and warn people who are at high risk of ischemic diseases such as heart attack. We plan to present our “identification” data obtained from public in an influential way like daily calorie you take from casual meals we have during normal a day. This comprises our second column, “clarification”.

ThirdLY, we need to be accurate and significant in whether we want to help all the stakeholders and public health. To do this, we chose the “specialization” step to get in contact with experts, doctors, specialists and related stakeholders of sectors and describe what has been done so far and what could be carried out.

Lastly, we have to convey all of these experiments, data and advice into a product. However, we must clear out the possible consequences, side effects of this product or public reaction to it. Therefore we have researched and performed a brain-storming session to describe what how it will be posed in the future, as the “application” step.

Collaboration

As a part of collaboration between iGEM teams, we invited Paris Bettencourt iGEM team to International Turgut Ozal University Medicine Congress of our university. We have organized a workshop about synthetic biology together.

We invited METU Turkey iGEM team to our university for dinner. We presented our projects respectively and discussed on some ideas and projects.  We debated on how we can help each other and what we can do for collaboration or P&P.