Inspiration

During the course of our project, our primary goal was to spread awareness of cardiovascular disease through different approaches. According to the Health Promotion Administration, more than 30 percent of people in Taiwan who died from COVID-19 have a history related to cardiovascular disease. (Lee, 2022) A report by Evohealth points out that the four main risk factors are highly prevalent in Taiwan and one of the six ways to combat this issue is to develop a targeted public health awareness campaign that emphasizes the importance of early detection and ongoing treatment of ASCVD risk factors. (Beardmore et al., 2022) Our team found out the awareness of cardiovascular diseases is low. To better address this issue, our team has invited experts to discuss some of the issues we face and what our society (Taiwan) challenges.

Although the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Taiwan spreads awareness of cardiovascular disease, a great percentage of citizens still fail to realize the problem of cardiovascular disease due to a lack of information and technology. Therefore, our team interviewed experts in fields such as vaccine production and medicine and understand the necessity of making our probiotic platform commercialize our product.

In addition, we realized that a lot of students in our school are interested in biology specifically synthetic biology; however, regular high school does not offer this kind of course let alone primary school. Therefore, our team decided to take the initiative and lead an education program. We taught students the core values of synthetic biology and introduced them to the iGEM competition. This learning experience is valuable and crucial to developing new technologies, solving problems, and making informed decisions as it builds logical and critical thinking skills. (University of California, Berkeley, 2022)