With the rapidly advancing biotechnology field of modern science, biosafety is becoming an increasingly important topic for the well-being of everyone. In particular, genetically modified bacteria, already becoming common even outside of labs, may pose an environmental risk when leaked. For our integrated human practices, our team set out to uncover the general awareness of the public on biosafety and the opinions of professionals in the field of biology.
Figure 1
Biosafety protection is a significant matter that can be highly connected to people's lives. However, most may not have taken attention to its importance and occurrence. To better understand the amount of public awareness of biosafety protection and gather data for our product, we conducted this questionnaire. The questionnaire was sent out randomly through various platforms, with all participants kept anonymous.
Until 16 p.m. on August 5th, 2023, we received 300 responses from numerous countries, with the majority from Shanghai and ages 15-25.
Figure 2: Distribution and Age of the 300 participants of the survey
The first concern of the team was about how much biosafety was related to people's daily lives. Questions in Figures 3 and 4 are presented here as representations. In Figure 3, the majority (60.66%) of respondents occasionally hear headlines and news about biosafety in daily life. In Figure 4, a relatively close percentage of people chose a little involved (40.66%) and not involved (35.74%) regarding the amount of biosafety measures in daily life or workplace. The statistics demonstrate that the majority of the public encounters biosafety measures rarely on a daily basis. Biosafety remains a subject that is distant from most people's lives.
Figure 3 (left): Responses regarding news about biosafety
(right): Responses regarding biosafety measures in daily life
Furthermore, Figures 5 and 6 summarize the public's understanding of biosafety. Results show that the public is familiar biosafety to a certain degree. Most respondents understand that a leakage of engineered bacteria would bring harms including but not limited to pollution or health hazards. Very few of them chose "no harm" as a response. Additionally, people see how biochemistry technology is the potentially most useful way of dealing with biochemical wastes, showing a sense of knowledge.
Figure 4 (above): Responses regarding the harms of leakages
(below): Responses regarding methods of disposing of biochemical wastes
The third and last group of questions, shown in Figures 7 and 8, illustrate the public's trust in technologies and treatments. The graphs show that the majority of people consider the technology and treatment used to be "maybe safe", demonstrating a certain level of skepticism in biochemistry technologies and wastewater treatments.
Figure 5 (left): Responses regarding the safety of new technologies
(right): Responses regarding public trust in wastewater treatments
A significant point of attention is how in all of the questions, a lot of the respondents chose "not clear" as their answer. This emphasizes the fact that first, biosafety is a specialized subject, and thus, people do not have a lot of knowledge about it.
From the questionnaire, we concluded four points:
1 Biosafety is not closely related to people's daily lives
2 The public has a limited understanding of scientific procedures
3 People do not have total trust in treatments and technologies for controlling bacteria
4 We need educational methods to spread knowledge of biosafety
Dr. Wang Qingzhuo
On 8/2, our team interviewed Dr. Wang Qingzhuo. Doctor Wang received his masters and doctorate degree from the University of Chinese Academy of Science and co-founded the company Nanjing Shiqi Biochemistry Technology Ltd..
As a founder of a biology technology company, Doctor Wang provided us with his professional opinion on how we could commercialized and improve on our product.
Figure 6
His suggestion on how we could commercialize our product highlighted its application in biosafety. Dr. Wang presented how we could modify the plasmid to the the request of our client to fit diferent species of bacteria.
He confirmed that the direction of our product was aimed at biosafety in biochemical synthesis that use genetically engineered microbes to mass produce compounds. Although there are already rigorous protocols to ensure the containment of labortory experiments and wastes, our kill switch provides an absolute treatment of any leaked bacteria.
Dr. Wang also addressed an area of growth in our project: He stated that our kill switch could be more temperature specific. As different laboratory environments across the world can have varying operating temperatures, having more than one kill-switch temperature parameter would be more appealing to buyers from different regions. Furthermore, he highlighted the vulnerability of our product to theft. With just a single sample of our plasmid, anyone can create inummerous copies of our product
We thoroughly contemplated Dr. Wang's approval and suggestion, discussing the information received with our developmental team. We conveyed his concerns on the commercialization of the idea with the entire team and decided to focus our future interviews with experts in the biotechnology and bioengineered production fields.
Dr. B
From 9:00 to 11:00 on 8/5, our team was bestowed with the opportunity to interview Dr. B about the legality of genetically modifying microbes and methods to accurately educate the public about our cause but also not cause panic. Dr. B, who has studied in both Peking and Tsinghua University, holds a docterate in public management and is a renown scholor in environmental engineering and law. Moreover, he participated in the 2022 UN Ocean Conference to speak about raising public awareness on protecting marine ecosystems.
（special mention: he has personally requested to remain anonymous）
Figure 7
Dr. B provided us insight on the current legal regulations on genetically modifying orgnisms, our target audiences, and the environmental consequences if a leak were to take place. He put emphasis on the approaches that we should take when educating the public during offline activities to accrately deliver facts while not causing panic. Moreover, he pointed out that biosafety would greater influence our daily lives as biology evolves to become more accesable to the public.
Other than speaking about methods to raise public awareness on biosafety, Dr. B also gave valuable critiques on our product. Knowing that our target customers are biochemical factories, he raised the question on whether they were willing to use the test kit and the compatbalility of our plasmid with their experiment.
From our interview with Dr. B, we learned that there exisits minimal legal regultions limiting our product, a question of compatability before companies decide to invest in our product, and a great need to accurately educate the public on our cause. He told us how mainstream media today often exagerates or suppresses the reporting of a biosafetly leackage, which leads to widespread misinformation and panic amongst people. For instance, he told us that high-grade laboratories are often the sources of such leakages and provided examples of SARS virus leaks in northern laboratories of China during 2003, 2004, and 2005, which caused lots of panic considering that SARS was the cause of a previous global pandemic. This blurrs the lines of what is acceptable and what is not amongst the public consensus, hindering the development of appropriate degrees of awareness. Moreover, we also learned that current biosafety rating systems only rate the level of threat of an organism based on the fucntions it has itself, which disregards all future artificial modifications on the lifefrom. For instance, the seemingly harmless E.Coli based on the system's criteria could be edited and made to wreck havoc in local environments. He expresses concern that this problem would get bigger and bigger as biology gets more and more integrated into all aspects of modern life. Dr. B encourgaged us to explore the views of professionals within the biochemical industry on using our product and center our offline education around games for a casual yet enriching experience.
Dr. Wen Zhiqiang
After coming up with a business plan, our team interviewded the stakeholder Dr. Wen for details about entrepreneurship. Dr. Wen graduated from Nanjing Shifan University and holds a company in the biosynthesis industry. A pitch presentation was held, and questions about the biosynthesis industry were asked. From this interview, we obtained important information and insights about the industry, the development of our company, and the responsibility we biotech companies have to society as a whole.
Figure 8-10
Through the interview, we gained insights into biosynthesis companies about how companies exist as what they are. Dr. Wen suggests a potential business model, highlighting the significance of small biotech companies to be unique and have reliable customers. We learned that some other current biosynthesis companies, such as the Anhui Huaheng, started off by establishing long-term business partnerships with bigger pharmaceutical companies. For small companies like us, it is important to solve existing problems and make a unique impact to fortify our existence in the market. Since our product implements a novel approach to addressing lab leakages, exploiting and developing our uniqueness enhances the value of our company. Our unique address to the real-world issue of bio-leakages and intellectual properties articulates our mission to control and limit pollution. We also learned insights in the pricing of plasmid-related products; the price of similar plasmid-related products are set to be around ¥1,500.
The interview also articulates the responsibilities we bio companies must take. As biotechnologies become cheaper and cheaper, more people, especially people who are less conscious about biosafety, have gained access to biotechnologies. Dr. Wen made a simple juxtaposition to illustrate the danger of this phenomenon. He exemplified the Covid19 pandemic: the genome of the Sars-CoV-2 virus could be made with no more than 6,000 dollars. Because potential destruction could be done at a relatively cheap price, preventing leakages has become a social responsibility that all bio companies must take.
GenHouse Bio Co.,Ltd
Figure 11-14
Dr. Tong
With questions regarding the demands and potential applications of our product, we interviewed Doctor Tong, a researcher and manager at the biotech startup GenHouse Bio Co.,Ltd. Before beginning the interview, Dr. Tong invited us on a tour around the facility of GenHouse Bio, a clinical-stage biotech company that focuses on developing anti-cancer therapeutics. We were introduced to the different laboratories and theirs purposes before sitting down with Dr. Tong with questions about our product.
We opened our interview with questions about awareness on biosafety. Dr. Tong first gave us his insights on researchers’ awareness of the amount of danger engineering bacteria pose to humans and the environment. Based on his experience in working with engineering bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Dr. Tong believes researchers greatly overestimated their danger in the past. As research of engineering bacteria developed, researchers realized that engineering E. Coli poses only a small threat as it does not spread easily and does not cause major illnesses. It is also easily diluted in the environment in case of a leakage. Because of this, he expressed concern for the demand of our product. He posits that because there are already incredibly strict regulations in place for preventing the leakage of genetically engineered bacteria, labs may not require extra protection. This means that our product may not be filling a gap in the market.
However, Dr. Tong immediately suggested how our kill-switch could have broader applications in the field of biosafety. He told us that our product’s previous fixation on E.coli limited the usage of the temperature kill switch system, suggesting that our product should offer to be tailored to the client's bacteria species or other more harmful bacteria, such as Salmonella, Listeria, and Staphylococcus aureus. If our kill-switch could work on other types of bacteria, we would have a larger market to work with. Additionally, it should be noted that Dr. Tong's company specializes in cancer medication research and has not developed any actual products yet. Synlotic Bio, the company we interview later on, more accurately represents our target customer, as they use engineering bacteria to create actual ingredients used in products. Therefore, Dr. Tong's opinions that our product might not have a large demand at his company does not represent its application in the entire bioengineering field, since they were not our target customers in the first place.
Synlotic Co.
Figure 15-18
Dr. Fan
To better understand the synthetic biology market and the technological challenges we faced while creating our product, we interviewed Dr Fan, who graduated from the Chinese Academy of Science. Not only so, Dr Fan is also an expert in the field with an enormous amount of experience, currently working at Sylnlotic Bio, a company focusing on the development and provision of customized enzyme-related technology and services.
During the interview, Dr Fan further clarified the harmful effects of bacteria leakage and the lack of awareness of bio-safety. Adding on, he noted the great potential of our products being used among many biotech companies to serve as a way to secure the company's work from being stolen. Also, he hinted at our product's position in the market and how to set the price of our product by providing an estimation of similar products. However, Dr Fan also explained the threat of our product being easily exploited since plasmids can be replicated efficiently through PCR and how I.P.R. (intellectual property protection) would be somewhat inefficient. To solve this issue, he suggested we change the form of our product into something like enzymes because it can not be infinitely copied and used, leading to our buyers having to come back to purchase our product once they run out of it. Lastly, Dr Fan concluded the interview by listing the company's departments and functions, inspiring us to manage our team.
After the meeting, Dr. Fan gave us a quick tour around the lab, where we got to observe how real-life researchers work and cooperate to create innovative solutions to existing problems. For example, we chatted with one of the scientists who kindly demonstrated how he used chemicals to purify solutions for a product. As we explored the lab, we also got to get in touch with machinery and technologies in the company and learned many functions of it.
The interview with Dr Fan helped our team enrich our views of our product by warning us of easy product replication—this influenced our future decisions on product adjustments and improved our market and product comprehension.
After conducting our survey and five interviews, we have gained valuable insight into the public's awareness on biosafety and how our product could improve to better suit the needs of stakeholders. Since biosafety is a more niche area of biology, the general public does not know much about it. From the different experts we have interviewed, we conclude that we must expand upon our product so it is applicable to more types of bacteria at different temperatures. Having a broader application ensures more companies can use our product to protect against bacteria leakages.
Summary of Project Impact
Our project aims to address the environmental concerns associated with the unintentional release of E. coli from laboratories into the natural environment. By developing a temperature- responsive kill switch in E. coli, we can ensure that these bacteria are eliminated when they transition from lab temperatures to natural temperatures. This technology will contribute to environmental safety by preventing potential ecological disruptions caused by lab-engineered bacteria.
Proposed end users identification
Our primary end users are biotechnological and research laboratories that work with E. coli for various purposes. This includes academic research labs, biotech companies, and pharmaceutical research facilities that utilize E. coli in their experiments and processes.
Application of our Product
We envision laboratories integrating our temperature-responsive kill switch into their E. coli strains. This will act as a safety mechanism, ensuring that any E. coli accidentally released from the lab setting will be eliminated upon exposure to natural temperatures. This technology can be incorporated into standard lab protocols, providing an additional layer of environmental safety.
Implementation of our Project
To implement our project in the real world, we have devised a comprehensive business plan. We will promote our technology through various channels, including scientific journals, news articles, and online platforms. Our primary distribution channel will be our website, "E. Cool-i". We have also conducted market and competitive analyses to understand the potential demand and positioning of our product. Financial planning has been undertaken to estimate startup and operational costs. Additionally, we are committed to adhering to safety and ethical standards, ensuring our product aligns with legal requirements and societal well-being.
For a more detailed insight into our business approach, please refer to the Entrepreneurship Page.