For those who have more of an affinity for biology than homemade miniature sweets, the Amino kit would be a better holiday gift than an Easy Bake Oven – though it does bear some resemblance.
The set, currently starting at $699, is made up of modular parts and is a small-scale bio lab equipped with a bacterial culture, DNA, pipettes, incubators, agar plates and other sensors used to monitor the growth of the culture. All of these materials fit into a color-coded wood dashboard.
Its creator, Julie Legualt, is a designer and graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and her Indiegogo campaign for the kit has already more than doubled the initial fundraising request of $12,500. Her fascination with a product designed around biology is unexpected, though.
“I don’t have a science background—I kind of hated science all the way through school,” she told Wired. “So I wanted to make sure that people who don’t like science don’t feel like this isn’t for them.”
The Amino kit revolves around the use of “apps” – step-by-step guides to making certain products with DNA. Users get specific instructions on how to insert the DNA into untransformed bacteria cells, and then incubate, grow, and maintain the altered microorganisms. One app teaches users how E. coli can be reprogrammed to glow much like a firefly. Another teaches how to optimize the metabolic pathways responsible for the production of an anti-parasitic compound used in cancer research, violacein.
Legualt hopes that the Amino kit will make biology and future scientific growth more approachable to a wider range of people by making it hands-on and mobile. As of 2 p.m EDT today, there were 14 remaining hours before the Indiegogo campaign comes to a close. Purchased kits are expected to arrive in March 2016.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo: Amino Indiegogo campaign
