Complimentary Silencers

Micro-needle assay

Inspiration

World right now is facing one of the biggest pandemic whose cure is unknown. There is also a lack of rapid detection kit for coronavirus. Patients of coronavirus sometime don’t even show general symptoms. We have developed a fluorescent drug that can act a fast-therapeutic agent and a diagnostic tool.

What it does

Our drug is a mixture of methylated-antisense RNA strands with green-fluorescent protein tag and enzymes DICER and Rnase H. Coronavirus have single stranded RNA, that can be silenced by our drug . Our drug is fluorescent only in absence of virus thus provide real-time analysis of viruses.

How we built it

Our team have developed a hardware model along with detailed circuit blueprint shown here Our team have also developed a computational model, one by using genetic algorithm and another using random walk.

Challenges we ran into

Due to unavailability of better computational hardware, we were unable to perform simulation for for complex and realistic systems. Also, being in a quarantine, the actual prototype is yet to be made.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have checked efficacy of our drug using :

Genetic algorithm The vrna and vacrna are RNA sequences of viral strands and antisense RNA strands of the drug given as input variable for our program. The alpha is the ratio of viral strands : drug RNA. For a population of 1,00,000 viral strands, alpha is set to be 0.9. It took about 400 time units to kill all viral strands showing the effectiveness of our drug. Due to lack of accessibility of better hardware we were unable to check effectiveness at alpha greater than 0.9.

random walk model It shows the simulation of RNA vaccine inside the cell using Random walk model. Several simulations were done for different sized cells. It is seen that, in bigger cell, the vaccine strand is somewhat localized as compared to smaller cells.

What we learned

What's next for Complimentary SIlencers

Given a chance, we assure you that we can make the whole setup within a week. As soon as we get access to biomedical labs, we have to prepare the drug and test it in-vitro. Mass-production can be done from the instruments available in the lab. We believe it is an all-round potential solution for covid-19 crisis.