Post/Biotics
February 18, 2016
What if the world's next antibiotic is in your backyard?
Website: www.post-biotics.com | Facebook: www.facebook.com/postbiotics
Post/Biotics is a citizen-science platform and ‘lab in a box’ toolkit providing the equipment, knowledge and science network everybody needs to support researchers in new antibiotic development. Most known antibiotics are developed from natural extracts, so potentially a new antibiotic could be anywhere. Post/Biotics distributes empirical research to school students by creating a platform for them to participate in this process. The pop-up lab, allows students to participate in discovering substances with antimicrobial values by testing locally available plants, vegetables, fruits, fungi, mushrooms & soil.
The use of antibiotics has enabled us to cure many diseases. However, current excessive usage, in particular the continued prescription of antibiotics to treat viral diseases to promote faster growth of animals in food production, increases the resistance of pathogenic microbes, resulting in a loss of efficacy of antibiotics. This poses an urgent threat to global public health and increases the cost of healthcare. WHO has declared antibiotic resistance as global health care crisis and has warned that if immediate action is not taken we shall soon be pushed back to pre-antibiotic era where simple infections and operations could be life-threatening. The coming cost is estimated at 10 million deaths per annum by 2050 and about 3% of global GDP.
The task of finding new antibiotics is both labor and resource intensive. Most antibiotics known to us today have been developed out of natural extracts – soil, plants, insects, deep-sea beds and volcanoes, all of which host useful microbes with antibiotic potential. What if the world’s next antibiotic was in our own backyard? Most known antibiotics are developed from natural extracts, so a new antibiotic could potentially be found anywhere.
We cannot expect a few scientists to solve our problems, we need everybody.
Post/Biotics is a vision for open source drug discovery. This pop-up lab democratises science, allowing anyone to test local plants, fungi, mushroom and soil. It showcases how availability of scientific tools for common people changes how society learns, creates and adds to scientific knowledge. With the help of an app, results generated by users worldwide are stored online, creating a library of antimicrobials that could be significant for developing new drugs.
Post/Biotics proposes an alternative system, what if we make tools to search for antibiotics available to everybody. How can a decentralised and centralised research function in parallel? This toolkit is a vision of open-source drug discovery, using design to enable scientific innovation by people, for people and with people.
Post/Biotics toolkit has been tested in multiple schools and academic organisations in UK and India. Below are a few images of tutors from UCL (Institute of Education) and The Cedars School, London, UK.
App screens and user flow:
User testing app with high school science teachers at UCL, London:
Seven (user) using Post/Biotics toolkit to test with samples in Hyde Park, London
Innovation Design Engineering, Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, June 2015
Credits
Project in collaboration with Josiah Zayner (ILIAD Project)
App development in collaboration with Jay Mehta
Inputs from Bio-Chemistry department at Imperial College, Natural History Museum, Living Medicine, Synibicite (Imperial) and Antibiotic Action
Conferences & Exhibitions
Gwangju Design Biennale -“Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”: Design! the Future (Exhibition, 2017)
Beazley Design of the Year, Design Museum (Exhibition, 2016)
100% Design London, Design Festival (Conference, 2016)
ShowRCA 2015 and Imperial Show (Exhibition, 2015)
Exhibited at Dubai Global Grad Show (Exhibition, 2015)
10×10 Design Series, Dubai Design Festival (Conference, 2015)
SustainRCA, London Design Festival (Exhibition, 2015)
Countdown 2030, UCL (Conference, 2015)
Mozilla festival, London (Exhibition, 2015)
Awards
IXDA Awards Shortlist 2016
Core77 Awards, Student Notable
Dyson Bursary
Helen Hamlyn Award for Inclusive Design by Innovate UK
National Runners-up Dyson Award
Althea Imperial Challenge and Institute of Global Health Innovation Challenge 2015
“A wonderfully well researched and socially based project that hit all the right notes from the outset, moving the dynamic of co-creation a step further.”
Jackie Marshall-Balloch, Innovate UK