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IMPLEMENTATION

Problem

Since the COVID-19 epidemic in 2019, the entire Chinese economy has been impacted. Based on our research and interviews with staff, we found that the expenses for outbreak prevention and control are very high. Since staff could not provide us with more detailed information during the interviews, we estimated the financial expenses for the "nucleic acid detection for all staff normalization". Based on the information provided by Zheng Zongkai of the Bureau of Statistics, we have divided the expenditure on nucleic acid detection for all staff into the following three parts:

1、Establish sampling sites

2、salary of sampling staff

3、Nucleic acid sampling and detecting costs

4、Antigen detecting costs

The cost of the two detecting methods is not the same, so questionnaires were created and distributed in Putian, Cangshan District and Pingtan County in Fuzhou. A total of 1264 questionnaires were collected. Since the proportion of antigen detection is small, antigen detection will be divided into nucleic acid detection in the following estimation.

The questionnaire does not collect the IP address and other personal information of the person filling out the questionnaire to ensure that we do not reveal information of the people in this survey.

Since the demographic results for 2022 have not yet been released, according to the total population of Fujian Province in 2021 is about 48 million people, each nucleic acid testing site to test 3,000 people, the establishment cost of each testing site is 40,000,000 RMB. The estimated annual additional expenditure is 640,000,000 RMB.

In addition to the medical staff responsible for sampling, the general public can also participate in the sampling work after receiving training. Based on the requirements and related policies, we assume that a sampling site requires three sampling personnel (300 RMB/person/day) and one information entry clerk (200 RMB/person/day) for each sampling site. The estimated annual additional expenditure is 6,424,000,000 RMB.

The testing institutions were mainly hospitals and third-party testing institutions. We use the sampling cost of 5 RMB from Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University Hospital as the unit price of expenditure, including the cost of swabs, reagents, test tubes and PCR testing, etc. The estimated annual additional expenditure is 87,600,000,000 RMB.

According to the estimated financial expenditure of 504,851,000,000 RMB in Fujian Province in 2021 and the estimated expenditure for the regularization of nucleic acid detection in Fujian Province in 2022 will be 94,664,000,000 RMB, accounting for 18.75% of the annual expenditure.

This is a very large financial expenditure!

Implementation

We checked the innovative solutions for outbreak preparedness in the last two years. They have created robots and assembly lines that automatically detect nucleic acid. This does not change the spread of pathogens nor does it save the government money. We wanted to create a more convenient detection device that would save the government additional money.Our ultimate targets are the government and the testing department. We showed them the implementation of our project and some good examples of synthetic biology projects. After talking about genetic engineering, they were worried about the security. So we did our best to change their perceptions about genetically modified organisms throughout the project.

Security and Licensing

Mo Renping told us a qualified product, first of all, should ensure national standards, industry standards and requirements, as well as can not be harmful to human health. If we want to use it in a wider field, we need to pass the product testing which is conducted by the Quality Supervision Administration: ① whether it will cause environmental pollution ② whether it will cause biological leakage. For laboratory security, we consulted Professor Chen-Yun Guo from the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, then we decided to implant a light-controlled suicide switch on our final applied engineering bacteria so that they would not leak out into the environment. For the hardware, we used a photosensitive resin that is almost non-toxic to humans and can degrade under UV light.

Devices

At first we brainstormed that we would apply the peptides screened from the random peptide library to the test strips for easy nucleic acid detection. However, during our subsequent social research we found that the market was nearly saturated with virus testing strips and our project cannot really solve the social problem.However, we have also found that outbreaks are now being prevented and controlled mainly through mass nucleic acid detection or self-testing at home. However, there are always some slack-minded people who choose to avoid testing by asking others to "test for them". This has led to mass infections. So we want to "bypass" the need for voluntary testing by residents in some ways. Using an alternative method to corroborate the existing virus transmission results.

After that, we learned about sewage epidemiology by means of some web videos. We were inspired that we could determine if there were COVID-19 virus in an area by testing for viruses in the sewers.

By checking the information, we found that the first sewage epidemiology detection methods were still in the stage of manual sampling. We then had the idea to develop a device to automatically take samples for testing and to automatically process the data for reporting to the epidemiology department.

The main options for the current automatic detection equipment are electrochemical, optical and thermal methods. After several discussions we finally chose electrochemical method and constructed two models of general biosensor and cellular sensor. We interviewed a teacher from our university who studies electrochemistry.

He gave us some suggestions.

1. The genomic effect in the sewage is large, so we need to process the sewage first before detection.

2. It will damage the chemical structure of the peptide if the biosensor which connects the peptide directly to the electrode is in direct contact with the sewage. This will reduce the lifespan of our sensor.

So we improved our device again. We finally chose the cell sensor. However, the detection limit of the cell sensor is high and cannot directly detect viruses which have extremely small amounts in the wastewater.

We started to think about how to gather viruses in the pre-treatment stage. After searching the papers, we found that for virus enrichment many aspects need to be considered, otherwise the proteins on the virus surface will be denatured leading to virus inactivation. For this reason, we specifically approached NEU-China, who developed a device to detect new coronaviruses in air last year. Their idea was to build an amplification circuit inside E. coli to reduce the detection limit. However, this involved too many chemical reactions, which made the final fluorescence signal difficult to be measured quantitatively. Therefore, we immobilized peptides from our random peptide library on the surface of E. coli in the pretreatment stage and designed the circuit to allow E. coli to "carry" the virus, so that the virus could be enriched without changing the original physical and chemical properties of the virus.

Future

In the future we will further improve our wastewater treatment system by building a real-time health system on top of the previous one, which will share data with local hospitals and anti-drug agencies. The system monitors and treats household domestic sewage, and the data collected will be processed and analyzed daily. Data suspected of having drugs or infectious diseases will also be screened and synchronized in real time with local hospitals or anti-drug agencies. The system will further reduce the spread of the virus, and will be the first to detect suspicious places and people with drugs. The system will improve people's quality of life while protecting their health. We also know that some developing countries have limited detection capacity, and when the number of infections reaches the country's detection limit, the country's health care system can be easily penetrated, causing harm to the country's economy,meanwhile, the prevention and control of the outbreak in neighboring countries will be challenged. So this device is extremely important when we want to curb the spread of the disease at an early stage. In subsequent improvements, we also wanted to reduce the cost of the device and build the system with simpler materials. At the same time, we also want to adapt to the situation that sewage treatment systems in developing countries are not well developed. This requires more investigation and improvement.

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