Partner: American Medical Women's Physicians Association (AMWPA)

AMWPA has historically been a very active nonprofit organization focused on preventative health, serving through its multiple annual health fairs that provide screenings and testings in different suburban mosques in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area. The nonprofit also conducts health education meetings and mentorship for pre-health students.

When reaching out to Dr. Rehana Kauser, the founding chair of the organization, for her thoughts on vaccine attitudes in the communities that attend the health fairs that AMWPA organizes, she acknowledged that there is a reluctance to take vaccines in the South Asian and Muslim community. She pointed towards multiple reasons why this may occur, such as lack of education on medical interventions and the purpose of receiving a vaccine before having the disease condition; hesitancy on a governmental vaccination initiative when a lot of Muslims living in the U.S. are immigrants and may not be fully adjusted to the U.S. healthcare system; and general stigmas or misinformation spread about vaccines causing detrimental conditions without understanding the difference between correlation and causation.

This conversation taught us crucial information about barriers to healthcare innovation for the Muslim and South Asian population of Dallas that AMWPA serves at its health fairs. The need for more scientific education aimed at the general public, with an emphasis on vaccine-hesitant audiences, underpinned how and to whom we presented our project going forward.

Event: UT Dallas SPUR Symposium

The SPUR symposium gave our team the opportunity to present our research to a wide variety of audiences: fellow synthetic biology researchers, college-educated individuals without scientific backgrounds, and friends and family of presenters who were not college-educated or experienced in the sciences.

As we presented, we identified that many audiences find the language of the synthetic biology field difficult to understand. We addressed this barrier by purposefully framing our work in ways that were approachable to both scientific and non-scientific attendees. For example, when speaking to individuals part of our honors college who came from an administrative background rather than a scientific one, we focused on describing scientific processes using our poster’s visuals and diagrams, and employed analogies to explain molecular techniques like cloning.

Partner: UT Southwestern HealthStreet Initiative

In order to truly understand the Dallas population’s stance on vaccines, we turned towards surveys that have been administered by our local health centers. Our project’s application in vaccine design falls apart if no patient trusts a formulation containing tardigrade proteins, so understanding who and what our local communities trust, what questions they have, where their reluctance comes from, and how scientific advancements may best be communicated to them remained crucial throughout our research process.

We sought insights from UT Southwestern’s Office of Community Health and Research Engagement, which serves North Texas’s diverse patient population. When speaking with Ms. Farra Kahalnik Cohen, the manager of the aforementioned office, we learned that the office operates the HealthStreet initiative, a national program where community health workers provide community members with free health screenings and health education. Through UT Southwestern’s involvement in this initiative, we could gather and analyze data from the Survey of Perceptions conducted as part of the Dallas HealthStreet hub, which documents vaccination perspectives across our local communities. Understanding where vaccine hesitance comes from helped us play a better, more productive part in educating our audiences and marketing our project as a potentially helpful and cost-effective advancement rather than an untrustworthy, incomprehensible mandate sent down from the ivory tower.

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Fig. 1: 1 is “Not at All” and 10 is “Completely, ~16.9% of respondents answered 5 or below

Fig. 2: 1 is “Not at All” and 10 is “Completely, ~17.2% of respondents answered 5 or below

Fig. 3: Viewpoints on Vaccination within the Dallas Region

Fig. 4: Trust regarding Source of Vaccine Iinformation

Fig. 5: Future COVID-19 Vaccination

Fig. 6: Access to Medical Care

To build transparency and trust with community members, we connected with the UT Southwestern Community Advisory Panel (CAP). This panel provided us with direct perspectives from individuals across North Texas in different fields ranging from volunteers, health professionals, and leaders of nonprofit organizations.

During the CAP meeting, members recommended using clearer strategies to explain information to non-scientific audiences to ensure our science is accessible rather than “behind closed doors.” They resonated with our use of analogies to explain scientific concepts, such as our metaphor of a cell uptaking a recombinant plasmid resembling a dog taking a pill hidden in peanut butter. We created pamphlets as a reference throughout our presentation with a glossary of key terms to understand our project clearly, and they greatly appreciated this. They also emphasized the effectiveness of animations and visuals in conveying scientific and research concepts, which encouraged us to continue utilizing this method in future presentation materials.

Although mRNA vaccines became more well-known during the COVID-19 pandemic, their mechanisms still remain not fully understood by the public. Members voiced their concerns about the safety of mRNA vaccines in the body, specifically questioning the dangers of injecting mRNA genetic material into the body and the impacts of its degradation. They also wondered about the tardigrade protein itself and whether it is removed from the vaccine formulation before administration or if it remains in the vaccine until injection and must then be degraded by the body. These were important considerations we had not previously explored, which prompted us to conduct further research as we designed our project around potential downstream healthcare applications. To assuage these concerns about injecting foreign proteins into living organisms, we explored modifying single amino acids in each protein to avoid MHC recognition and thereby an allergic response, in mice and humans.

When asked about the intended audience for our research, our team was prompted to think more deeply as we had not yet fully defined our scope. This insightful question highlighted how we must tailor our educational materials and presentations for different levels of understanding and clearly convey our threefold purpose: explaining mRNA vaccine technology itself, explaining our hope to add the novel element of stress-protective proteins to it, and dispelling any vaccine hesitancy that may hinder the development or rollout of the potential novel design. We concluded that our audience should be broad to include all age ranges and that feedback from diverse age groups would be essential for leading a project that our communities could wholeheartedly support.

After deciding our population of focus would be individuals of all ages eligible to receive mRNA vaccines across different brands, we met with the UT Southwestern Youth Community Advisory Panel (Youth CAP). In this discussion, we asked members to share their experiences from the pandemic and how their own or their families’ health needs were affected by it.

One member described how, during the 2021 Texas snowstorm, their mother had to store her insulin vials outside in the snow to prevent them from thawing inside the house when the power went out. While this action risked the vial being damaged by natural debris, the danger of uncontrolled indoor temperatures was considered a greater threat to the medication’s potency. Another member recounted a similar situation with their grandmother’s medications, which also could not be properly temperature-controlled during the storm.

These insights highlighted how natural disasters can destroy sensitive medications without proper storage, putting patients’ health at risk without a backup plan. We considered how approaches similar to ours could be applied to non-vaccine products like medications that also require strict temperature control, and that our research could focus on more than just vaccine formulations. Future iterations of our research may include investigating tardigrade protein-mediated protection of biomolecules besides nucleic acids — such as peptides like insulin, for example — in light of these stories.

The panel emphasized the need for clear, take-home materials. In response, we created pamphlets with a glossary of key terms, reinforcing the value of multi-format science communication.