Overview of the 52Hz whale
Background
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) consists of a group of genetically heterogeneous neurobehavioral disorders characterized by impairment in three behavioral domains, including communication, social interaction, and stereotyped repetitive behavior. Like Alice, the world's loneliest whale, her unique singing frequency of 52Hz makes it inaudible to her companions. Chinese epidemiological survey shows that the prevalence of ASD is between 0.2% ~ 0.4%, and differences in geographical and clinical diagnostic criteria may have different impacts on the study of the etiology of ASD.
However, autism is acquired congenitally and cannot be cured, and the treatments that exist today are mainly psychotherapy, medication, etc. These approaches are more traditional, and the effects of the intervention have their own advantages and harms. Synthetic biology, as an emerging discipline, based on genome and biochemical molecule synthesis, integrates biochemistry, biophysics and bioinformatics technologies, aiming to design, modify, and reconstruct biomolecules, biocomponents and biological differentiation processes to construct living biological elements, systems, and artificial cells or organisms. This technology has not yet been widely used in the treatment of autism, but it can be designed and created. This feature is very suitable for the research and development of autism drugs.
Introduction
We will present the inspiration for our project on this page, the outline of the overall project plan, the introduction of our stakeholders, and show the process of our project implementation through an interactive timeline.
The call of the deep sea focuses on our source of inspiration: how we identify problems and how we find the most appropriate, beneficial and sustainable way to solve them.
The birth of a giant whale mainly shows our project blueprint and our original design. It also analyzes the existing situation and the expected impact of the project ——whether it can reflect the care for all groups in society, whether it complies with relevant laws and regulations, whether it is beneficial to the environment, and whether it is in line with the concept of sustainable development.
Communication between the giant whale and the world mainly shows our process of discovering stakeholders, analyzes the coverage of our stakeholders, and shows our diversified analysis of stakeholders.
The growth path of the giant whale mainly shows the interactive timeline of the implemention of our project plan, which shows the specific process of our project, what difficulties we encountered, what suggestions we received from experts in the field, how we analyzed and dealt with the suggestions, and what changes were made to the project plan.
The call of the deep sea
Hearing the Song of Alice
The NJMU-China team has a good cooperative relationship with the Haizhixing autistic children rehabilitation center, and participates in interactive volunteer services such as accompaniment, presentation, and activity design every year. In the regular accompaniment and science popularization activities, we found that the cost of rehabilitation training for autistic children is relatively high - transportation costs, time costs and parents' energy costs, which hinder autistic children from receiving regular psychological training. According to relevant interviews, we learned that some parents are also worried about the side effects of autism drug treatment. Therefore, our team wants to change this situation and find a relatively economical treatment for children with autism with minimal side effects, so as to reduce the load on their families and bring them happiness.
Analyze the difficulties of Alice
Currently in China, the existing autism rehabilitation system is imperfect, yielding limited treatment effectiveness. Primarily, autistic children undergo isolated training throughout the day, and a scarcity of institutions exist to train parents.
Special education and rehabilitation training is currently the main method used in China, most of these institutions are prepared by parents of autistic patients, but they lack professional guidance and financial support, and the rehabilitation effect is not good.
However, the demand for these institutions is still in short supply, with half of children with autism waiting in line to enter institutions for rehabilitation, less than 1/3 of autistic children starting rehabilitation before age 3, and 1/5 of children not starting training until age 6.
At the same time, there is a shortage of autism rehabilitation professionals and medical professionals with expertise in this field. According to relevant reports, the existing autism rehabilitation teachers in China can only cover 1.3% of the population, and the remaining 98.7% of the population cannot receive effective rehabilitation training.
For the treatment of autism, most of the antipsychotic drugs for the treatment of autism have common adverse reactions such as extrapyramidal reactions, abnormal glucose and lipid metabolism, pathological changes in electrocardiogram, liver and kidney function damage, and excessive sedation, which can be improved after symptomatic treatment. However, due to individual differences, each person often responds differently to drugs, so the specific side effects are also different from person to person and need to be handled correctly by a physician.
When a patient receives systematic drug treatment, their psychiatric symptoms can be effectively alleviated. After sufficient consolidation therapy and clinical observation, the drug dosage may be considered for gradual reduction. However, discontinuation of drug treatment often carries the risk of relapse, and previously resolved symptoms may resurface.
Dancing with Alice
We have been working hard to make it possible for the "Whale Alice" who cannot understand the world. Our team is a team of mainly medical students, and we think about whether we can design a suitable drug that can treat children with autism and achieve the needs of low cost and wide application. The synthetic biology approach gives us this possibility, allowing us to design a drug from scratch and build and implement it using an engineering approach. We hope that the drugs we have designed will be effective in treating the symptoms of autism with fewer side effects. Therefore, we consulted our supervisor, Professor Xingyin Liu, to evaluate the feasibility of our project idea, and after receiving a positive answer, we started the relevant design of our project.
We learned about a specific subtype--- patients with increased brain autoantibodies, which are classified as autoimmune diseases, and we think there may be problems with the blood-brain barrier in these patients, causing macromolecules such as antibodies to enter the brain and attack neurons.
After brainstorming, our team decided to find a way to block the high expression of antibodies in patients to achieve the effect of treating this disease. A small molecule metabolite of the intestinal flora is synthesized by synthetic biology and specifically binds to antibodies, thereby reducing antibody concentrations and relieving symptoms.
The birth of a giant whale
AREA Framework
AREA Framework is a scientific and reasonable way to promote the design of the project with the three sections of anticipation, reflection and action, which is conducive to the project operator to discover the problems and impacts of the project in advance. -------Yong Li,Professor,School of Marxism, Nanjing Medical University
We adopt the AREA framework (anticipation, reflection and action) to design the entire project, and objectively analyze the advantages and disadvantages of our project, the opportunities and threats that may be encountered. Furthermore, we foresee the possible impact of the project implementation process (social level, academic level, etc.), we hope to make our project more perfect and specific through specific design and analysis. Assisting definite groups of autistic children and their families enables Alice to integrate into society more effectively.
Expectations
We will show the steps we need to complete at each point in time, and list the difficulties we may encounter:
Increased brain autoantibodies in ASD patients→ design small molecule metabolite structures→ specifically block autoantibodies → alleviate ASD symptoms
Query a large number of literature to identify ASD-related antibodies → screen small molecules that can bind to the antibodies by the intestinal flora library → design synthetic biology pathways to engineer bacteria to produce metabolites → molecular docking verification efficiency
Figure 1: Project experimental steps
Reflections
The contribution of the SWOT method is to use systematic thinking to match these seemingly independent factors for comprehensive analysis, so that the formulation of corporate strategic plans is more scientific and comprehensive. ------Baidu Encyclopedia. SWOT Contribution
We reflect on the difficulties that may be encountered in the project and the impact of the project at the beginning of the project, so we combined the existing SWOT analysis methods with our project to summarize a unique opportunity - Threat Map (SWOT)
SWOT is the Boston analysis method, also known as the Dawes matrix, the situation analysis method is a commonly used strategic analysis tool to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a project, organization, or individual. It helps identify key factors in the internal and external environment, providing guidance for strategy development and decision-making.
It is composed of four elements: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
- S——Strengths:
- Targeted therapy, can treat autism more targeted
- Have professional laboratory equipment and equipment ；
- The members of the team have a wide range of professional coverage and have good learning ability ；
- W——Weaknesses:
- The drugs currently involved in the team can only target one specific subtype ；
- The time period between the design and the realization of large-scale production of the drug is very long ；
- The cost of designing the drug cannot be controlled or difficult to control ；
- O——Opportunity：
- There is no similar product on the market at present
- Cooperate with the Autism Center, provided by patients and parents who are willing to provide advice ；
- There are many professionally related teachers and professors who can provide experimental technical support ；
- T——Threat:
- The public does not have high acceptance and recognition of synthetic biology ；
- The realization of the idea requires high experimental support ；
- Many biopharmaceutical companies are also working on related topics.
Through SWOT analysis, the giant whale framework that helped Alice integrate into the world has been clearly displayed in front of our eyes. However, the birth of a giant whale must pay for the next concrete action!
Actions
In the expected action, we envisage the impact that the team may bring during the implementation of the project.
| Business | Academic | Society | Regulations | Experiment | |
| Physiology | No involved | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐ | No involved | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Safety | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Friendship | ⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐⭐ |
| Respect | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐ |
| Fulfillment | ⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ |
Communication between the giant whale and the world
To create a whale that could perfectly communicate with Alice all around the world, our founding team had to communicate and coordinate with stakeholders. Stakeholders, i.e. all the people involved in our team's projects, influence our projects in one way or another. We hope that we will be able to find stakeholders in all areas and listen to their advice and put ourselves in their shoes.
The team created a unique Giant Whale Model that vividly shows the magnitude of the importance of each stakeholder, the presentation of stakeholder opinions and feedback from the team, the process of changing the project according to stakeholder opinions, and the visualization of the final output. The model references many of the world's mainstream analytical models, and has been innovated and integrated to make it more suitable and drive the development of our project.
Stakeholder map and closed mind chain---The thinking of the giant whale
The brain of the giant whale shows our team’s analysis and thinking of stakeholders.The main stakeholders of our team are children with autism and we can also call them end-users.Taking this as a starting point,we created a complete stakeholder map and a closed mind chain through brainstorming, thinking together and complementing each other.
The giant whale we created always put the stakeholder map and the core goals of our team in the most important position in the practice process of helping Alices.Like the Big Dipper, it navigates our project.
We first listed the different fields:business, government, industry, medicine, academia, and public.We then list the relevant people in this field according to types of these different field:
| Business | Practitioners in autism rehabilitation facilities and pharmaceutical enterprises |
| Government | Relevant pharmaceutical safety auditors, relevant regulation makers |
| Industry | Lab Equipment Engineers |
| Medicine | Autism clinicians and pharmaceutical enterprises |
| Academics | Professors of autism related fields and professors of synthetic biology related fields |
| Public | Families and classmates of autistic people |
Through the stakeholder map, we found that we have a wide coverage. We need to communicate and exchange with people from different fields, obtaining their valuable suggestions. We will objectively analyze their suggestions according to the fields they come from and adopt or retain their suggestions.
Closed thinking link: This is our team's systematic approach to dealing with opinions. As the whale's way of thinking,it guides the whale to make correct and reasonable responses after communicating with the world.
helping the giant whale roam around the deep sea
Ansoff thinks that strategic management is different from preceding business management as it is a continual and dynamic process, from the decision to realization, aiming at the future. The fundamental aspect of business strategy is determining your current position, setting your aims, and specifying the necessary actions to accomplish your targets. Furthermore, the Ansoff model is the foundation for the 1991 Power/Interest matrix.
We can see from the structure of the Giant Whale model that the Power/Interest matrix,as an existing mature interest analysis model, is like the tail and fin of the giant whale, which helps our giant whale roam freely in the deep sea and communicate with Alices around the world. In order to further clarify the priorities and better carry out the focus of our team's experiments and activities,we create the Power/Interest/Attitude matrix according to the existing model:Power/Interest matrix, which introduces the dimension of "Attitude" on the basis of the existing two-dimensional evaluation. In the Giant Whale model, “attitude” is illustrated as a jet of water from the giant whale, which represents the feedback and suggestions gained during our process. We design as above because we hope that the "interest" dimension can effectively reflect the appeal of our team concept to our stakeholders.Our analysis is two-way,it not only has the analysis of stakeholders ,but also the interest of stakeholders in us. It shows how much the team values the impact of our project and the attention we pay to solve the problem.
The growth path of the giant whale
The growth path of the giant whale takes a certain amount of time, and at the same time it needs to communicate and learn from different characters.By presenting the interactive timeline, we show the information and suggestions we have gained through communication with different stakeholders during the process of the project. We use the information and suggestions to continuously improve our plans, so that our projects can reflect our inclusiveness, love, and empathy.It shows that we put ourselves in the shoes of children with autism while solving their problems.
Furthermore we conducted some interviewe,to learn mor about us ,please click"Communication",or view our pdf following"
