Wiki/2014.igem.org/Team:MIT/Survey

SURVEY

What does Mr. Joe Public think of our plan to diagnose and treat Alzheimer’s disease?

Our synthetic biology approach to diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s disease was built and developed around the idea of an administrable therapeutic for patients with the disease. In order to get our system into the patient’s brain, he/she must be willing to receive it in whatever manner necessary. Thus, one important consideration we had for our project was how it would be perceived in the public eye.

With this in mind, we designed and implemented a survey to help us obtain a satisfactory answer to this question. Our survey targeted members of the general public, and we sought to learn what people of varying backgrounds thought about our project. Specifically, we aimed to determine what method of delivery of our system was most agreeable to the majority of members of the general public.

The methods of delivery we were considering could all be categorised as either ex vivo or in vivo cell modification. Specific details about potential delivery mechanisms can be found here.



Methodology

The aim of our survey was to determine how members of the general public felt about the three possible methods of physical delivery of our system: brain surgery, spinal injection and blood injection. Each of these would require a certain combination of vehicle and target (for example, a blood injection would require a viral vector that targets neurons).

Once we had determined exactly what we wanted to glean from the public, we wrote the survey questions that directly addressed these concerns. We then wrote several “set-up” questions that would enable us to determine each respondents’ familiarity with the concepts of gene therapy and Alzheimer’s disease (to help us see whether people would want to receive our system at all, and how their willingness to receive a therapeutic affected their level of comfort with the different delivery methods).

Once the survey was constructed, we beta-tested it on members of the MIT community, including professors, post-doctoral candidates, undergraduate and graduate students. We took into account their comments and suggestions, as well as any instances of misinterpretation, and modified the survey to address these issues.

The completed survey was distributed by members of our team every day over the week of August 11-15th at the Boston Commons. We handed out surveys to any willing respondent, and offered a piece of candy as incentive for participation.

A proportion of our surveys was distributed online by Tufts iGEM on our behalf.



Expected Results

This survey included several set-up and background questions, allowing us to gate the participants’ responses based on age, level of education and familiarity with Alzheimer’s disease.

In light of our proximity to several Boston universities, companies and research centers, we anticipated that our population would contain a higher than average proportion of students and scientific professionals.

We also expected that the majority of the respondents would know someone who has/had Alzheimer’s disease, and would claim some familiarity with the health effects of the disease.

Despite its prominence in today’s science and technology, gene therapy is merely more than a buzz-phrase for most people. As such, we expected that most of our respondents would not understand the term or its implications (respond “don’t know” or disagree with gene therapy for themselves or their loved ones).

Finally, we expected that a person’s comfort level with the delivery method would increase as the method became less invasive - we anticipated that people would be more comfortable with blood injection than spinal injection or brain surgery, and that a total number of respondents would prefer blood injection over the other 2 methods.