Let's take Venezuela to iGEM for the first time!
Hi there! We’re P(d)PANA, a group of undergrad students and professors trying to gather funds to fulfill our participation fee in an international synthetic biology competition - the iGEM Design League. A Venezuelan team has never taken part in the iGEM Competition; with your help we can be the first one doing that!
We aim to collect funds to cover the registration costs of the competition and be able to participate and present our research!
Our proposal for the iGEM Design League competition is using the renown technique called phage-display as a method for screening antigenic peptides derived from non-glycosylated regions of SARS-CoV-2’s S (spike) protein. These regions of S’ protein will be those primarily identified as antigenic targets promoting immunity via T-cell receptors and also the regions that appear promising as potential targets for the development of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 virions.
All our efforts will be directed towards creating an in silico library of phagemid constructs that (based on immunoinformatic analyses and computational simulations) will provide the best immune response and also be the best targets for neutralizing antibodies.
The rationale behind this project is based on the reality faced by emerging countries in terms of their inaccessibility to vaccine doses produced by first world industries, this sums to their precarious health systems and lack of funding for research, thus, our project will result into a putative vaccine that will be easily manageable, easily produced, and high effective (based on immunoinformatic predictions).
Therefore, this candidate vaccine could be useful during the current COVID19 pandemic in the Latin-American scenario helping countries to reduce the risks of transmission of current SARS-CoV-2 variants.
If you’d like to know more about our project, please follow us in our social media and donate to our crowdfunding, every bit of help is welcome since it pushes us towards our goal of participating in iGEM Design League!
Our Team:
Javier Uzcátegui – Biology Student from Universidad Simón Bolívar
Daniel Buvat – Biology Student from Universidad Central de Venezuela
Khaleel Mulal – Biology Student from Universidad de Los Andes
Andres Mendoza – Mathematics Student from Universidad Simón Bolívar
Rafael Urdaneta – Biology Student from Universidad de Los Andes
Juliette Passariello - General Coordinator (Mentor)
Ixchel Garcia - Data Science (Mentor)
If you want to learn more about the project and the team, follow us on our social media @Pd_PANA
