Team:WITS-South Africa

The link between HPV and cervical cancer is well-established. Although much progress has been made in developing a vaccine, the vaccines that are currently available have some limitations (mainly due to high cost and inadequate accessibility) in their ability to prevent disease burden in developing countries, where 80% of cervical cancer deaths occur annually.

This inspired the search for a method of detecting the virus that will alert the infected individual in a discreet yet persistent manner. The machine would also have the potential to be further adapted to have the ability to neutralise the virus and prevent the infection from spreading. Basically, the machine that we wish to design will be able to detect an infectious agent and inform neighbouring bacteria - as well as the host - as to the presence of that pathogen.

The chassis of the machine, Lactobacillus gasseri, is a predominant commensal vaginal microbe and is ideally situated to detect and deter HPV. Interbacterial communication is achieved by quorum sensing, which has been studied in detail in various organisms such as gram positive bacilli and thus we have elected to use one of these pathways as the means of propagating the response signal throughout the population. The greatest challenge facing us is primarily the mechanism of specifically identifying HPV - ideally through a receptor unique to HPV, resulting in the intracellular activation of our circuitry. Currently, this form of direct recognition and reaction to a virus does not exist in bacteria and introduction of this mechanism into bacteria has never been achieved.

Our team consists of students from various disciplines such as molecular biology, mathematics, engineering and philosophy. Whilst the biologists will focus on building the machine in the wetlab, the mathematicians and engineers will model its predicted behaviour and effect in vivo whilst the philosopher will focus on the ethics of creating such a machine for medical application.