At the beginning of November, more than 5,000 students and university graduates worldwide gathered in Paris to compete in the Synthetic Biology competition organised by the iGEM Organization, something started 20 years ago by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
During the four days in Paris, they reserved a gold distinction for one of the participating Greek university teams. The ten young scientists who made up iGEMAthens won a gold medal for their research in the diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease, the most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's, which affects tens of thousands of patients and their caregivers in Greece.
"A head of the competition told us that Greece consistently has the best ratio of participating teams to its population over the years, with distinction. He told us that we are a case study of the competition," said Mrs Katia Spanou, one of the ten group members, speaking to Proto Thema.
An indicator of the impact the Athenian team's project had on the global competition is the invitation it received from the prime minister. Mr. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, after their success, had received the ten researchers at Megaros Maximos and discussed with them their proposal, the easy-to-use diagnostic test of the neurodegenerative Parkinson's Disease.
How the journey began
"The iGEM competition is 20 years old. In the beginning, five groups participated, while there were more than 400. This year, they reached 420. Every year, the participating groups have to find the next ones. It is an open process in which every interested person from the university applies. Applications for the next competition opened last Thursday. Our journey started last year in January when the previous ones chose us," said Mrs Myrto Pliakostamou, a 4th-year student at the Chemical Engineering Department of the National Technical University of Athens.
Metsovio is one of the four university institutions that fed iGEM Athens - the other three are the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, the University of Western Attica and the University of Piraeus. As she explains, the team came up with the idea from a combination of factors. Each team's project idea must be submitted and completed by June. Consequently, iGEM Athens had approximately five months to present its research objective and find funding for its implementation.
"The doctors on our team knew that Parkinson's disease is severe and difficult to diagnose and manage. Also, along the way, I discovered that someone close to me is suffering from it," continues Mrs. Pliakostamou.
The whole group met with the PARKINSON Association of Patients and Caregivers of Athens and came face to face with the hard face of the disease.
"We met patients. We talked a lot with them. Many told us they had not known what they had for a long time. They suffered until the diagnosis was made. The characteristic tremor is one of the most frequent and obvious symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. However, many patients don't show it at all or much later than other symptoms, so they don't reach the diagnosis quickly. Many wished they had known earlier what they were suffering from, to know which enemy they were fighting, as they told us," described the same student about what they got from their meetings with the patients.
The iGEM Athens team came up with the design of an easy-to-use diagnostic kit, picking up the thread of previous discoveries. Their goal is to make it possible to detect Parkinson's Disease at an early stage, before severe motor symptoms appear, and therefore to improve the prognosis for patients substantially.
In 2015, a retired nurse from Scotland, Joy Milne, made headlines for her unique ability to detect Parkinson's by smell. As the ten researchers explain on their website, due to her hereditary hyperosmia, she was able to notice a difference in her husband's smell 12 years before his official diagnosis, when he was just 33 years old.
Her suspicions sparked the scientific community, and in 2019, several compounds primarily responsible for the "Parkinson's smell" were identified. Of these, four volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were found to differ in concentration in skin sebum between healthy people and patients with Parkinson's disease. These were eicosane, hippuric acid, and octadecanal, whose amounts were increased, and perillaldehyde, which decreased in Parkinson's patients.
"Thus, a new biomarker was found, and there was a target for our team to detect. Until now, this process has been done with large, expensive and inaccessible gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) machines, and a cheaper, portable and more easily distributed solution was greatly needed," they describe on their page.
The kit and its operation
The method they developed was based on a virus. M13 is a harmless bacteriophage virus genetically modified to attach to specific organic compounds.
"These compounds were originally detected in the sebum of the back. The kit will include four plates, one for each compound. The design provides for the kit to be like a small box that the health professional will place on the back of the potential patient," describes the student of the National Technical University of Thodoris Pouris.
The kit will give a colour result indicative and characteristic of the disease when it detects the "odours of Parkinson's Disease."
"The results are then scanned with the mobile camera and processed in a digital application of our design," he says.
"It is worth noting that the project concerns the creation of a diagnostic kit for health workers in this phase. This, as a false positive result, can occur, as in any other diagnostic method, which can be psychologically devastating for the examinee and his relatives. "There is nothing like it. Conventional methods of diagnosis are used until today," Mr. Pouris continues.
After many working hours, the researchers reached the level of genetic modification of the virus granted to them at the EKPA Biology Laboratory. The commitment based on the iGEM competition conditions was to bring the project as close as possible to its implementation by the end of the competition. The team appreciates the significant positive result but seeks the resources and framework to continue.
Students and alums sought funding sources independently, reporting that other groups from abroad had more support from their universities and other agencies.
"All of us felt that we would deal with it for a year, and that's it. It wasn't easy, and we didn't think we would stand out. It was a difficult year, and we got great satisfaction when we saw that our hard work was rewarded. We started as unknown children with a vision and ended up as friends with a successful goal," says Mrs. Filoxeni-Kyriaki Laskaridou.
Despite their difficulties, no one rules out the continuation of the research and the completion of the project provided that the practical problem of funding is solved so that they can devote themselves undividedly to developing the diagnostic kit. Alongside its research, iGEM Athens organised educational and social events throughout these months to communicate its work.
From George Cotzias to iGEM Athens
Parkinson's disease is linked to a tremendous Greek discovery 56 years ago. George Cotzias, the distinguished Greek researcher and clinician, was the son of Kostas Kotzias, former mayor of Athens.
His research in 1967 caused rave reviews in the world medical press immediately after it was first published in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title "Modification of Parkinsonism".
The discovery of L-Dopa's mode of action in Parkinson's disease was groundbreaking and opened new horizons in neuroscience, particularly in neurophysiology and neurochemistry of the brain.
It is characteristic that to this day, L-Dopa remains the primary medicinal substance for treating the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease.
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