Universitas Indonesia (UI) accomplished an achievement at the 2021 International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) in Paris, France (November 4-14, 2021). Fourteen UI students across faculties who joined the iGEM UI team successfully presented Gold Medal Prizes for UI. This is the fourth Gold Medal that UI has received from iGEM Competition after its participation in the event since 2013.
The team consisted of nine students from the Faculty of Medicine, namely Kevin Tjoa, Fransiskus Mikael C., Angelina Clarissa, William Nathaniel, Benedictus Ansel S., M. Afif Naufal, Firda Izzain B., Violine Martalia, Teshalonica Mellyfera. The team also consists of students from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Samuel Febrian Wijaya, Gert Antonio Tobing, and Hans Mahadhika, as well as Madelstein Melhan (Faculty of Engineering), and David Su (Faculty of Dentistry).
This year, the UI team raised a project titled Helicostrike. Helicostrike is a project focused on designing an E.coli that can destroy H.pylori biofilm and kill it. “We design a way of working where we modify E.coli bacteria with synthetic biology methods so that it can kill H.pylori bacteria in the human digestive system which is one of the factors causing peptic ulcers, chronic gastritis and gastric cancer in the digestive tract. The design of this method is important as an effort to reduce the risk of antibiotic resistance related to conventional treatment of H.pylori infection,” said Kevin Tjoa, Team Leader.
According to Kevin, this project is especially important for communities in Indonesia, as the prevalence of H.pylori infection in Indonesia is 22.1%. It is also known that some tribes in Indonesia, which are the Batak, Bugis and Papuan tribes, have a high susceptibility to H.pylori infection. They got this information from interviews and research conducted by the dean of Faculty of Medicine UI (FM UI), Prof. Dr.dr. Ari Fahrial Syam, Sp.PD-KGEH, MMB, FINASIM, FACP.
This design has several advantages, including being more patient friendly, “In the future, we will strive to advance it, if it is already being launched as a product, then Helicostrike will be made in the form of yogurt, so that it is easier and more delicious to consume than drugs in general, but still has high effectiveness,” Kevin added.
In addition, with this design, it is also expected that the patient’s treatment can run effectively-efficiently without using a lot of drugs, because the current conventional treatment uses a combination antibiotic consisting of clarithromycin triple, sequential and bismuth quadruple which treatment reaches 10-14 days. The many types of drugs that must be consumed and the long duration of antibiotic consumption can make patients become bored and do not finish the antibiotic completely, thus increasing the risk of antibiotic resistance.
The entire research process was conducted under the guidance of Dr. dr. Budiman Bela, SpMK(K) (Department of Microbiology FM UI UI), assisted by a team of researchers from the Center for Virology and Cancer Pathobiology (PRVKP) FM UI . “This achievement is an extraordinary thing considering that it is certainly not easy to prepare for this competition in a pandemic atmosphere that limits human movement,” said Dr. Budiman.
The pandemic situation does bring its own difficulties to the team. “The difficulty we felt the most was that we could not meet directly and work on our project in the wet lab, so we tried harder to be able to prove that the design we worked on had high effectiveness with modeling from the dry lab alone,” Kevin said. To overcome these obstacles, the team conducted in-depth literature reviews, held various discussions and interviews with seniors and experts, and studied and worked harder until they found the right formulation.
iGEM is an annual synthetic biology competition held by the iGEM Foundation, an international non-profit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The history of iGEM began as a student project conducted on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which was later developed into the largest synthetic biology competition in the world. This year, the iGEM competition involved more than 352 teams from around the world.
