Good Health and Wellbeing

Target 3.8 - Achieve universal health coverage, including access to quality essential healthcare services and access to safe, effective, quality, and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all

Our project contributes to SDG target 3.8 by exploring new ways to make treatment for vitamin B12 deficiency and pernicious anaemia more accessible, effective, and patient-friendly. The current standard treatment (consisting in lifelong B12 injections) can be painful, costly, and difficult to access, particularly for patients with mobility challenges or those living far from healthcare facilities, even in Finland where access to healthcare is considered good. These barriers often lead to irregular treatment, strain on healthcare systems (which has consequences for other treatment and care activities as well) and unnecessary suffering. One of our goals with AbsorBuddy is to provide an alternative that could reduce the need for injections and improve treatment accessibility for patients whose B12 absorption is impaired and who are struggling to have access to regular injections.

Target 3.4 - Reduce by one-third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases through prevention and treatment, and promote mental health and well-being

Both B12 deficiency and pernicious anaemia, though often overlooked, have significant implications for physical and mental healths. Symptoms such as fatigue, cognitive decline, depression, and nerve damage can severely diminish quality of life if left untreated. A non-negligeable proportion of these cases go unrecognised for years due to insufficient diagnostic tools and limited awareness among healthcare professionals. Through our stakeholder engagement, we learned that delayed diagnosis and ineffective treatment worsen health outcomes and also cause profound psychological distress for patients who feel unheard or misunderstood. By focusing on improving the accessibility of treatment, our project indirectly supports mental health and the prevention of chronic complications associated with prolonged B12 deficiency. Additionally, our public education efforts, such as accessible videos and surveys, help to break the lack of awareness around B12 deficiency, empower patients to advocate for better care, and inform the public about early warning signs. In doing so, our work contributes to reducing preventable suffering and promoting holistic well-being, addressing both the physical and emotional dimensions of health.

Furthermore, our interviews revealed that B12 deficiency is frequently misdiagnosed, especially among older adults, because its symptoms often resemble those of ageing or neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. In many cases, individuals may experience walking difficulties, incontinence, or cognitive decline that could be reversed or alleviated with proper B12 supplementation. Yet, because these symptoms are assumed to be irreversible consequences of ageing, the underlying deficiency often goes untested and untreated. This issue underscores a serious gap in medical awareness and diagnostic practices, where treatable conditions are mistaken for permanent decline. By raising awareness through our outreach materials and stakeholder engagement, we aim to help prevent such misdiagnoses and reduce avoidable suffering, advancing the SDG 3.4 objective of improving early detection, treatment, and well-being.

Quality Education

Target 4.4 - By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship

Our educational initiatives, including workshops, competitions, and the BioLingua app, directly contribute to equipping youth with technical and scientific skills essential for future employment and innovation. By participating in the Kipinä science competition and the IBO workshop, we inspired students to pursue careers in STEM fields, providing mentorship and practical insights into the university experience, research possibilities (including in synthetic biology) and scientific communication. Our BioLingua app further advances this goal by offering accessible, multilingual learning materials that teach biological theory and concrete laboratory techniques, accessible to people of any age. This empowers students from diverse backgrounds, including non-native English speakers, to build the vocabulary and conceptual understanding needed to thrive in scientific and technical environments, even outside of their home country. Together, these initiatives help cultivate the next generation of scientists and innovators, contributing to SDG 4.4 by promoting skill development, employability, and inclusivity in STEM education. Thus, in addition to lowering barriers to STEM learning and highlighting how synthetic biology can intersect with sustainability and health, our work empowered learners by integrating cultural and linguistic inclusivity into science education.

Reduced Inequalities

Target 10.2 - Empower and promote the social, economic, and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or economic or other status

Our project contributes to Target 10.2 by highlighting health inequalities and advocating for a more inclusive healthcare landscape. B12 deficiency and pernicious anaemia disproportionately affect groups that already face barriers in healthcare access, such as the elderly, people with chronic illnesses, and those in low-income or rural areas, even in countries of the Global North. Regular injections require time, financial and logistical resources that are not equally available to everyone, making accessibility a core equity issue. By laying the groundwork for the development of AbsorBuddy, we attempt to reduce dependency on frequent clinical visits, thereby increasing autonomy and reducing inequality in treatment access. Moreover, our engagement with diverse stakeholders (patients, doctors, civil society groups, and researchers) helped us understand how social structures and medical regulations can unintentionally exclude people by not recognising their needs. Through those meetings and our public communication efforts, we sought to amplify patient voices and highlight the need for more flexible, patient-centered approaches in healthcare systems. In this way, our project contributes to the broader goal of empowering individuals to participate in decisions affecting their well-being, promoting equity and inclusion in healthcare.

Target 10.3 - Ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies, and action in this regard.

Through our Human Practices research, we identified systemic inequities embedded in existing medical guidelines for B12 treatment. Many patients experience inadequate care because rigid regulations (like the “one injection every three months” rule) do not account for individual variability in symptom response. Despite communicating their needs, patients often face skepticism or reluctance from healthcare professionals, highlighting a structural imbalance of power in clinical care. By documenting and communicating these issues, we contribute to raising awareness about policy-level gaps that perpetuate inequality in healthcare outcomes. Our project demonstrates that scientific innovation must be accompanied by policy engagement, emphasising the importance of collaboration between researchers, clinicians, and regulatory bodies to design more flexible and inclusive frameworks. In this sense, our work in Human Practices points to the need for systemic change toward healthcare systems that listen to patients, adapt to diversity, and eliminate biases in access and treatment quality.

Responsible Consumption and Production

Target 12.4 - By 2030, achieve the environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle, in accordance with agreed international frameworks, and significantly reduce their release to air, water and soil in order to minimize their adverse impacts on human health and the environment

Our project contributes to SDG 12.4 by embedding environmental considerations into several stages of our work, such as reagent selection and waste management. Laboratory research of students, while often small in physical scale, can generate non-negligible negative environmental impacts through chemical waste, solvent use, and single-use plastics. Recognising this, we examined and documented the materials, reagents, and workflows used throughout our project to identify opportunities for safer and more sustainable practices.

Then, through our stakeholder discussions, we shifted from unrealistic and speculative life-cycle modelling of an unscaled supplement toward a realistic assessment of our laboratory footprint. We categorised reagents by hazard level, identified chemicals with high environmental persistence (such as ethidium bromide, phenol, and chloroform), and ensured proper segregation and collection of hazardous liquid waste for centralised disposal. Some reuse practices, such as recycling Coomassie staining solutions and regenerating purification resins, further minimised hazardous waste output. Moreover, we quantified the plastic waste generated by our experiments (~ 4.4 kg) and evaluated recycling barriers linked to biosafety regulations. This data now serves as a benchmark for future Aalto-Helsinki and other iGEM teams, encouraging them to adopt tracking systems and alternative consumables. Our work also highlighted the environmental cost of “invisible” lab practices, such as excessive energy use during purification or cold storage, prompting procedural changes like batching experiments and optimising instrument usage.

By explicitly documenting both the environmental impact and mitigation strategies of a synthetic biology project, we have taken steps toward achieving less environmental harm through the management of laboratory waste. Our approach demonstrates how even student research teams can contribute to SDG 12.4, by reducing hazardous waste at its source, using greener substitutes, ensuring proper treatment, and thus promoting a culture of environmental responsibility within scientific practice.

Target 12.5 - By 2030, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse

Our project has potential to contribute to SDG 12.5 by addressing a critical yet often overlooked source of medical waste: the lifelong use of B12 injections. Our long-term environmental analysis remains preliminary, but our hypothesis is grounded in insights from multiple stakeholders, including patients and clinicians, who identified the environmental burden of injectable treatments as a recurring concern. Since current treatment protocols rely on frequent intramuscular injections, they generate large quantities of disposable plastic, metal, and packaging waste, such as syringes, needles, vials, and single-use safety containers. These materials are not recyclable and must be treated as biohazardous waste, ultimately ending up incinerated. Over a lifetime of treatment, this waste accumulates significantly both at the individual and global level.

By proposing AbsorBuddy, we aim to explore a pathway toward reducing this waste stream at its source. If proven safe and effective, an oral alternative could replace or reduce the frequency of injections for certain patient groups, thereby preventing substantial amounts of sharp and plastic waste before it is ever generated. This approach represents a shift from end-of-life waste management toward prevention, which is considered more impactful and can help reduce healthcare-related waste generation, directly advancing SDG 12.5.

Target 12.6 - Encourage companies, especially large and transnational companies, to adopt sustainable practices and to integrate sustainability information into their reporting cycle

While our team operates within an academic setting, our work under SDG 12.6 centers on creating a framework that aligns biotechnology research with industrial sustainability principles. In developing AbsorBuddy, we recognized that real-world deployment of any recombinant supplement would inevitably involve collaboration with biotech companies, contract manufacturers, and regulators. Therefore, we began integrating sustainability thinking into our processes early and identifying where environmental data collection, reporting, and transparency would be necessary for future scale-up. Thus, we began building documentation habits that mirror those of industrial environmental management systems, including energy tracking, material inventorying, and reagent-level hazard assessment. This form of “micro-reporting” creates a foundation that future research or industrial partners can expand upon when assessing large-scale environmental performance.

Our investigation into sustainable sourcing for microbial media components, such as plant-based peptones, brewery-derived yeast extract, and second-generation dextrose, further reflects SDG 12.6. These substitutions model the kind of upstream supply-chain transparency that sustainability-oriented companies must adopt. Similarly, by quantifying plastic waste and identifying possibilities for closed-loop recycling or supplier take-back programs, we align our laboratory practices with circular-economy reporting frameworks. Finally, by publishing our sustainability reflections openly on our wiki, we contribute to the culture of transparent environmental reporting that SDG 12.6 promotes. This encourages other iGEM teams and early-stage biotech innovators to integrate sustainability metrics from the outset: long before regulatory pressure or commercial scaling demands it. In this way, we extend the objective of accountability of SDG 12.6 into the formative stages of scientific innovation.