Clinic visits

From the offset we visited the Ninewells CF clinic, as well as making visits to Western General in Edinburgh. Patients were extremely generous with their time, sharing what it was like living with CF, the biggest day to day challenges they faced and what could help them reduce the burden of care they experienced. This information was vital to our project, and two main points came from it:

-Patients highlighted how quickly their health could deteriorate without early intervention

-Patients described the large amount of time spent in hospital, and how this negatively impacted their quality of life.

Both of these points highlighted the need for a new faster detection method that wouldn’t significantly increase burden of care already faced by patients.

Whilst we had built the synthetic biological detection systems, we needed to identify where we saw the device being implemented, and design it accordingly. If it was to be used in Hospital clinics, patients would still have to travel long distances to use it.

Initially, we started to design the L.A.S.S.O. as a home device, to maximize convenience for the patients. During this process we discussed with patients whether they would want to see their results straight away, and the difficulty of representing this data in a meaningful way.

After speaking to patients and a psychologist at Ninewells, we were concerned about the psychological ramifications and impact on a patient’s mental wellbeing if the Lung Ranger showed that they had developed a chronic infection. However, it was clear that patients wanted more control and autonomy over their condition.

Home visits with nurses provided an alternative opportunity for us to implement the detection device within a support network patients are familiar and comfortable with. We decided to make a detection device, the L.A.S.S.O., which would be portable. This means that it could be taken by the nurse to a home visit and used at home, with the psychological support of the clinical care team on hand. [link to the page] Speaking to patients, nurses and clinicians at a later date, we decided that the data generated would be sent straight to the clinician via the L.A.S.S.O. interface, to avoid misinterpretation of results by the patient and reducing any undue stress. [link to app]

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Clinical Microbiology

Current methods for detecting and identifying lung infections in CF patients take too long. Acute lung infections can rapidly become chronic biofilm infections, making them much more difficult to eradicate with antibiotics. We wanted to improve current detection methods for respiratory pathogens in people with CF, and so we visited Dr William Olver in the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory in Ninewells Hospital to further understand this time consuming process and how we could improve upon it.

Lung Ranger Jenny at the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at Ninewells Hospital and current streaking techniques used there.

Current techniques depend on labour intensive culture dependent methods for identification of respiratory pathogens in clinical samples. On average, culturing the samples and informing treatment takes 2 weeks or longer if cultures have to be tested for specific antibiotic resistance.

The aim of the Lung Ranger is to identify specific respiratory pathogens from sputum samples in less than 2 hours by detecting the signaling molecules they produce.

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The CF Clinical Care Team

Dr James Chalmers

A chest physician at Ninewells Hospital and researcher in the Molecular Microbiology Division, Dr Chalmers has been one of our advisors with regards to CF Clinical Care.

Dr Helen Rodgers

A chest physician at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, and at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, Dr Rodgers introduced us to patients and the clinical care team in Edinburgh, allowing us to get a broader view of the impact of our device for CF patients.

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Cystic Fibrosis Team Ninewells

Lawrie MacDougall (CF Clinical Nurse Specialist), Gill Brady (CF Clinical Nurse Specialist), Ali Smith (Physiotherapist), Alison Marshall (Dietician) and Ash Sinclair (Clinical Psychologist) make up the CF Clinical team in Ninewells Hospital. Throughout the project they have been incredibly accommodating and welcoming each week, and have given us a holistic view of all the different aspects of care required in managing Cystic Fibrosis through their expertise in different disciplines. The team had been incredibly kind sharing their time and knowledge with us. We took the opportunity to share some of what we did in the lab with the team, and to introduce them to Synthetic Biology in action!

We wanted to understand what we were expecting of patients when we asked them to produce sputum samples in order to use our device. We needed to know whether it was reasonable for us to base our device around a certain amount of sputum brought up by the patients. To see for ourselves, Dave, Roddy and Jenny went to the Clinical Research Centre at Ninewells. Using nebulized saline solution, theyr were able to cough up sputum from our lungs. It was pretty unpleasant, and gave us an insight into the daily life of someone living with CF, and also highlighted what we were expecting from patients.