We're Team Injectimod, a team of students from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) who are the Australian entrants for BIOMOD, an international biomolecular design competition held annually at Harvard University.

We want to develop vaccines for conditions affecting millions of people every year (e.g. chlamydia and dysentery) by learning from Nature to artificially rebuild parts of the bacteria that cause them. 

Specifically, we want to re-assemble the needle tip of the Type Three Secretion System (T3SS), which allows bacteria to pump toxins into our cells.

Why reconstruct a bacteria you may ask? If we can build the tip artificially, then body's immune system can learn to recognise and fight it.

This is a potentially game changing approach to vaccine development - artificially rebuilding parts of bacteria to get the body to develop it's immune resistance to them. If it works, this approach could be used in vaccines for conditions such as dysentery (80 million cases a year), typhoid fever (21 million a year), chlamydia (215 million a year) and a long list of other diseases

(Fun fact - the Black Plague in its heyday used the Type Three Secretion System).



Trying to build these systems, as opposed to trying to understand them only through observation, could also help answer fundamental questions about how biological machines actually work.

What in the science?

Who exactly are Injectimod?

Budget Breakdown

What is "BIOMOD"?

Update - Final Stretch/Biotoons!

Science is expensive and so is flying to America from Australia!

We've been working on this with increasing fervor (and decreasing sleep) since April. Your  funds will be used to help us complete our lab work (i.e. build the tip and prove it) and travel to Boston so that we can present our work to teams from all around the world at Harvard University. 

We're fortunate enough to receive significant support from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, the NSW Government and various departments at UNSW. 


However we're still about $14 - 19,000 short of our total fundraising total (as detailed below) and we're asking for your support to help get us over the line. 

(Please note - pledges are not tax deductible.)

It's lonely being on the frontier. Biology has traditionally been studied through observation - nobody has ever rebuilt parts of bacteria before. This means we're likely to find some surprises when we try to build these protein complexes ourselves. 

We're fortunate to be working in a lab which studies biology in the same way (by trying to build it). This means that we have a wealth of experience to draw from as well as the opportunity to conduct experiments using cutting edge techniques (such as single molecule fluorescence, biolayer interferometry and DNA origami) to get stuff done.