During our project, we have thought of innovative ways to help eczema patients with FLG mutations, as well as raising the awareness of the disease to the general public, providing insights to the industry and helpful wet lab documents for future iGEMers and young researchers. We hope our efforts paid during this project can make a great impact on the scientific community and the development of treating the disease.
There is currently no cure for eczema. Topical steroids offer temporary relief but bring long-term risks including thinning skin, dependency and despair. Biologics are very expensive in price. Current therapy only focuses on the downstream inflammatory responses. With FLG supplements, we can catch up to the root problem—skin barrier dysfunction caused by FLG deficiency.
Many drugs available nowadays focus on temporary symptom reliefs. In our project, we proposed to supplement artificial FLG for skin barrier repair. This can provide an alternative solution for eczema patients.
Educating and spreading awareness about eczema through different IHP activities such as making Instagram posts and street interviews can allow the public to understand this disease and let eczema patients know more about precautions and countermeasures while facing environmental triggers of their symptoms.
During our project, we have asked many advisors including professors of public health and biochemistry of HKU and CUHK, letting more professionals know about our project and giving them the opportunity to apply our ideas in the industry.
Through workshops, and collaborating with other schools in Hong Kong, we can build a closer connection between Hong Kong’s iGEM teams, by understanding each other’s project, as well as promoting the competition.
Our core team members held several intensive small-scale lab workshops from January to May. Each workshop that would have will have members with a group of 5 together learning hands-on lab skills and lab safety with the core members together. This ensures a solid lab knowledge for our future members.
Mini ProjectThe protocols we found online were too complex for us to follow. Therefore we have made guidelines and a booklet explaining all the basics for a general iGEM engineering cycle. We hope this booklet can help future iGEM teams in handling these experiments and equipment in a more easier way.
Wetlab Guidelines