iGEM team Leiden big winner of international competition

The finale of iGEM, also known as the Giant Jamboree, normally takes place in Boston, but corona threw a spanner in the works. The fourteen Leiden iGEM students therefore followed the final via a video connection. "We had known since last Thursday that we were competing for the Grand Prize," says biomedical sciences student Amber Schonk in Leiden University weekly Mare. "That was what we all hoped to win the most. But we also wanted the prize for the diagnostics category, and we succeeded!" Schonk said to Leidsch Dagblad: "We celebrated it well on Sunday evening, but not too late, because by twelve o'clock we had run out of adrenaline."

The result of iGEM Leiden is quite good: a total of about 250 teams from all over the world took part in the competition. The jury was impressed by the concept that the students came up with: the universal virus test kit Rapidemic. The team now wants to go beyond a concept and actually develop the invention. "We are already working on a new competition, the Gulliver Prize for Entrepreneurship," said chemistry student Aukje Beers in Mare. "We really want to continue our project outside of iGEM."

The student team wants to use Rapidemic to detect infectious diseases at an early stage. The test kit must be able to provide a solution to dangerous infectious diseases even in the most remote areas. A handy box contains a complete mini-laboratory, as it were, with which a doctor can determine in a short time and with minimal costs whether a patient has the disease in question.

We previously highlighted Rapidemic in a 'Project in the spotlight'. You can read that article here.

iGEM Leiden 2020 won the following prizes: