BNN leads Safe-by-Design and dissemination activities for DeDNAed
What’s going on with DeDNAed? We are catching up with our project partners to see what they have achieved, what hurdles they are facing and what impact they expect our project, creating a biosensing platform using DNA origami as a “nano-breadboard”, to have on the scientific community.
Our next interview was with the team from BioNanoNet Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, otherwise known as BNN, located in Graz, Austria. We spoke with Julia Voglhuber-HÃķller, who has taken over the Safe-by-Design activities. She works alongside colleagues Susanne Resch (SbD) and Caitlin Ahern (communication & dissemination).
What is your role in DeDNAed?
BNN has multiple roles within DeDNAed. The one most visible is communication & dissemination throughout the project. In this task we manage all public communication, generating a corporate identity of the project and ensuring our research reaches a wide audience.
Our second role is generating a Safe-by-Design (SbD) concept for the sensor platform. Here we assess the status of safety of individual components and the complete platform, as well as the safety of the involved processes. Based on this we identify hotspots and formulate recommendations on improvements.
What are you working on at the moment?
We are currently in the phase of assessing the status of Safe-by-Design activities within the project. This is done via questionnaires and bilateral meetings with the technical partners. The new information is processed and we are aiming to perform a comparative analysis to an earlier assessment.
For communication & dissemination we are preparing these interviews ð and coordinating the dissemination of final results that will be coming out in the next few months. We help partners prepare for conferences and have some public science events planned. We are also overseeing any scientific and non-scientific publications from our partners.
What have you achieved so far?
The results of our initial questionnaire at the start of the project, paired with our current update questionnaire, will be integrated into our SbD concept and report. The initial questionnaire identified some hot spots where information was lacking, and we are curious to see how the project has developed further in this area.
We have created a series of demonstration videos in the labs of our partners TUC, IMMM and UP. It is exciting to be able to show our colleagues at work, performing techniques that might be unfamiliar to some. We try to share as much knowledge as we can throughout the project.
Have you changed course at all?
We were able to maintain our approach, but due to the nature of SbD itself we always have to stay highly flexible in our work.
What do you expect from the final stage of the project?
We will be putting a lot of time into the analysis of the questionnaires, comparing them to the previous status assessment and finally writing the Safe-by-Design report. We are eager to give our final recommendations to further advance SbD in this area and the sensor itself!
In terms of dissemination, the last few months will see publications and posters or talks at several conferences. We hope to share our results with relevant communities as widely as possible, potentially also in a final webinar.
Will DeDNAed have an impact in your field?
DeDNAed will have an impact in the area of Safe-by-Design, which has now advanced to Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) in the sense that this type of assessment and concept generation is often not done in fields like this (e.g., medical sensor development). Therefore, it will advance our current knowledge of the applicability and highlight pitfalls and challenges that can then be addressed in future concept generations in similar projects involving nanomaterials and advanced materials.
