The incidence of Dengue has grown dramatically around the world in recent decades.
According toWHO,the cases reported increased from 0.5 million cases in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2019. Furthermore, social and environmental factors including unplanned urbanization, waters torage practices, rapid population growth, and etc. In addition, Dengue is a highly transmissive disease, where every infected mosquito will stay viremic for its whole life and symptoms of infected people get more deadly if they are infected again. Since there are still no cure to Dengue yet, and the infected cases keep in creasing dramatically, our team want to facilitate inventing medicine that could suppress the function of the helicase.
Furthermore, our team found that there is a lack of effective in vitro high-throughput screening methods and medicine to find potential inhibitors of RNA helicase, a quick screening method is required. Therefore, we aim to design a drug screening system to discover medicine. In order to ensure our project is good and responsible for the world, we conducted several human practices to investigate the social impact and advices for our project.
First of all, our team conducted an online survey to investigate the public awareness of Dengue and possible inspiration for our project work. Data analysis of core survey questions are showing below.
Figure 1 “Do you know about dengue virus”
Figure 2 “How much do you know about the dengue virus?”
From the hundreds of respondents, 60.61% of people are aware of the virus, this followed by up to 19.39% unknown and 20% wonder. Morever, only about 16% of respondents know some basic knowledge about the virus.
Figure 3 " Do you know how to prevent dengue fever virus?"
Figure 4 "Do you know how to treat dengue fever?”
As the figure 3 and 4 shows, 24.85% of the people think to prevent it by killing mosquitoes, 12.73% think to prevent it by injecting vaccines, 1.82% think to wear masks, and the remaining 60.61% think all of the above.From the answer to this question, we know there are not many people who know and understand the dengue virus.But there are still people waiting for the right answer, and we should make people more aware of this disease.
20% of people think that medicine to treat, 9.09% of people think that rehydration to treat, 3.03% of people think that self-healing can be treated, and 68.18% of people think that the above ways can be treated.From the answer to this question, we can see that there is not a lot of knowledge about the treatment of dengue virus, which is also expected, which shows that there is a lack of understanding of various viruses, and we need to vigorously promote and popularize this knowledge.
Figure 5 "reasons for not wanting to get vaccinated"
Figure 6 "What material assistance would you want if there was an outbreak of dengue fever in your area?"
When it comes to the "reasons for not wanting to get vaccinated", more than half of the people were afraid of sequelae, and most of the others believed that vaccination was unnecessary.
For "What material assistance would you want if there was an outbreak of dengue fever in your area?" About 67% said mosquito nets would be effective, while some suggested using drugs, improving the environment, etc.
Figure 7 “how the general public learns about new drugs”
For the final questions, we asked “how the general public learns about new drugs” to get inspiration for our business plan, and we found that the vast majority of people learn about them from social media, and that many people also learn about drugs recommended by their doctors. Thus, social media will be a good way for us to popularize related knowledge and promote our team and project.
In Conclusion:
The survey result shows that the dengue virus has not yet fully entered the public domain, and our team aim to conduct related education activities to popularize the knowledge and synthetic biology info behind it. Also, our team will use social media to popularize and promote our team and project as the data indicated.
Interview with Prof.Chen Lili
Purpose of the interview:
To learn the general knowledge about dengue virus, the way of infection, how to prevent infections and what are the potential problems of our project.
Expert background:
Prof. Chen is a researcher working at the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and her main research interests are drug development and mechanism of action studies of new coronaviruses. She has worked at the Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Research for nearly 18 years and has experience in dengue research.
Figure 8&9 Interview Prof.Chen
Progress:
Prof. Chen said that the symbols for dengue are fever, headache, muscle aches, rash, and fatigue, such symptoms are similar to normal colds and fevers. The dengue virus is spread by the salivary gland of Aedes. The best way to prevent the infection is to kill mosquitoes. If there's an infection, there is no special treatment, usual treatments are used in the hospital might have such as transfusion.
The dengue virus spread widely across more than a hundred countries. In China, it is prevalent in hot places, such as Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan and Hainan. Imported cases also happened a lot, which may lead to further infections. Prof. Chen thinks that the demand for the dengue reagent kit is high and the market is big.
Difficulty and challenge:
The mutation of the virus is very fast. It is hard to invest in different types of drugs to deal with different types of viruses as long periods are required to invest in new medicines.
Figure 10&11 Visiting Prof.Chen
Suggestion:
The best target is the human body. Because the mutation of the virus is very fast. It is hard for to kill the virus under the fast paces of mutation. It is more efficient to focus on the immunity of people. By strengthen the immunity, we can rely on the human body to mobilize its immunity and kill the virus no matter how mutated the virus is.
By making it more difficult for people to get this disease in the first place, and invade the human body in the first place. Then after the invasion, I was able to quickly mobilize the immune system to kill it, and some people could be fine without taking medicine.
The meeting was mainly about the discussion of drug development and drug screening, including the development of specific drugs and vaccines for the dengue virus and the issues that need attention in drug screening. During the discussion, Prof. Chen emphasized the need for a deeper understanding of the principles and design of each step in the research process and the importance of experimental safety. For the future of drug development, Prof. Chen was optimistic that the continuous development of new technologies and methods would bring more possibilities. Finally, the students in the dry lab also mentioned the issue of commercialization, but Prof. Chen believes that this will require more research and innovation to achieve. Prof. Chen believes that the study of drug development for dengue is an important topic. Still, because the virus mutates so rapidly, it is challenging to keep up with the pace of change, and suggests looking at key nodes in the human body or the virus to solve this problem. In the end, Prof. Chen urged everyone to prevent illness ultimately by improving immunity, exercising more, staying optimistic, waking up early and going to bed early, and hoping everyone can have a healthy and regular life.
Interview with Xingang Prof. Yao
Purpose of the interview:
The purpose of our interview with Professor Yao is to get more information about dengue virus from the perspective of an expert who studies dengue virus, such as how exactly dengue virus relies on mosquitoes for transmission, why it is transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, what are the factors affecting transmission, etc. Also, we would like to obtain optimization for our products.
Expert background:
Professor Yao Xinguang is currently Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Southern University of Science and Technology, and Professor of “Master Lecture-II” of China University of Science and Technology. He was Director and Chair Professor of the Centre of Excellence for Computational Intelligence and Applications at the University of Birmingham, UK, and President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, as well as lecturer in Immunology and Biochemical Pharmacology.His research areas include immunopharmacological research on dengue and influenza virus infection, high-throughput drug screening of type 2 diabetes drugs, discovery and development of regulators of pancreatic beta cell dysfunction, and immunopharmacological research on type 2 diabetes.
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Figure 12&13 Interviewing Prof.Yao online
Summary of the interview
(1) Details of the spread of dengue virus and factors affecting the spread: after the mosquito bites a patient suffering from dengue fever, the dengue virus will enter the body of the mosquito and multiply in the mouth parts, and the mosquito because of the peculiar body mechanism, and will not be infected, then if the mosquito goes to bite other humans, the virus will enter the body along the mosquito mouth parts. Most mosquitoes can spread dengue virus, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes for more, mainly because Aedes aegypti species accounted for most of the total number of mosquitoes, so generally speaking we will say that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes spread dengue virus. There are many factors affecting the spread of dengue virus, mainly the temperature, the number of tourism, population density, hygiene conditions. The higher the temperature of the place the more easily mosquitoes grow, which is conducive to the spread of dengue virus. The high amount of tourism is easy to spread dengue virus to other places. The higher the population density, the higher the rate of dengue virus transmission. Areas with poor sanitary conditions are prone to breeding mosquitoes and the rate of dengue virus transmission back you elevate.
(2) Protein traits of dengue virus：Dengue virus is a genus of flavivirus in the family Flaviviridae. The virus particles are dumbbell-shaped or spherical, with a diameter of 40-50 nm.The protein in dengue virus is a single-stranded positive strand, the genome is a single-stranded RNA, and NS3 is a very important enzyme that is carried in the RNA. A dengue virus contains 11 proteins.
(3) The professor's original intention and current progress in researching dengue virus: Since the professor's company is in Guangdong, which is a high prevalence area of dengue fever in China, he chose to research dengue virus, and there is no drug treatment for dengue fever, and many people die every year because of it, so Professor Yao wants to help solve the problem of dengue virus. Professor Yao's research on SIRT2 inhibitor can control the infection, but SIRT2 is a human host molecule, currently if we use it directly, there will be some problems to the human body, so it is still advancing, hoping to enhance the activity, using less dose but to achieve better inhibition effect, and at the same time Professor Yao and his team have applied for the relevant patents.
For the impact of our team experiment and products
Professor Yao emphasized that first of all, we should go according to the purpose, familiar with the experimental steps and optimize the experimental system. Sometimes due to the influence of each person's approach and temperature environment or process, if the fluorescence can be seen before the detection, then in the production should pay attention to the degree of fluorescence color after adding the enzyme, if the color is the same, to think whether there is a problem with this substrate or enzyme. Enzyme to ensure that there is activity, to make a good control, to see where the fluorescence is issued, to adjust the concentration of enzyme and other factors. Also check if there is a problem with the enzyme standard. The cost side can be started by optimizing the alcoholization method and customizing the raw material from other pharmaceutical companies. Be sure to plan for a good first step system. Also, be patient when doing experiments and look carefully for problems at each step before optimizing.
Interview with Dr.Xie Yuli
Purpose of the interview and expert background:
To solve the problems in the experiment and to get advices on our projec plan, we interviewed Dr. Xie, who is postdoc of organic chemistry major and graduated from Columbia University , in Shanghai. Dr. Xie is now a CEO of Wigen Biomedicine.Dr. Hsieh has been working on dengue virus issues and is very knowledgeable and helpful to our team.
First , we mainly introduced our team with business plan and product in the form of PPT, and also asked Dr. Xie about the problems our wet team students had in the experiment, and Dr. Xie gave very professional answers. From this part, we learned about better channels to market our product (we can cooperate with more famous companies that produce kits), ways to reduce the cost l(customize the materials used), and the problems Dr. Xie found in us, etc. And then, Dr. Xie took us to the lab tour to let us know the usual working environment of the lab staff and the lab instruments.
Figure 14 We are introducting our business plan
Figure 15&16 Lab tour with Dr.Xie
Here we summarized some contents of the interview with Dr.Xie as follows:
(1) Political&Legal:
The FDA approved a new injectable vaccine, Dengvaxia (dengue fever vaccine), to prevent endemic dengue fever. The FDA approved the Dengvaxia vaccine for the prevention of dengue fever caused by all dengue virus serotypes (1, 2, 3, 4)
(2) social：
Dr. Xie mentioned that the serious damage of medical resources to the environment, etc. affects global economic and political development, as well as human longevity and normal human life.
(3) Technology:
Dr. Xie also mentioned the important point that viruses are harmful to our bodies, so we need to develop vaccines or inhibitors to treat these viruses. As technology advances, it will become easier and easier for us to make vaccine-related products (such as our kits). Also, as technology develops, we will be able to develop products that test more accurately and can detect more viruses. When we provide more complete kits to companies or hospitals that want to develop vaccines, we can make the process of testing vaccines easier and faster for them, and ultimately develop effective vaccines without detours so that everyone's health can be improved to a higher level.
(4) Economic:
The economy plays a big role in the process of vaccine development and product development. When the economy is sufficient, we will have enough money to develop our products so that our products will have better quality and better results, and if we make mistakes in our research, we will have enough money to start over to make up for the mistakes we made, and at the same time, when we have sufficient economy, we can acquire more talents and labor to develop our products, which speeds up the speed and improves the quality of our products.
Through these human practices we conducted, our team gained the knowledge and better understanding of our project from the experts and the pulic. We believe that our project will be socially and technically benefit as we took a step forward to find the cure of Dengue virus.
To conclude, our team aim to create an effective drug screening system to find potential inhibitors of RNA helicase, where our potential buyer of Dengue medicine developer could use to speed the screening process.
Our product will be an reagent kit that is used to test whether the drug inhibits the activity of the helicase in the dengue virus
Moreover, our plan to implement our project is divided into domestic and foreign market by direct sales to professional enterprises and teams and overseas distributors.