IRB conditional approval and mycrobes recruitment!

It's been a while!

We have spent the last 6+ months working on our IRB (Institutional Review Board) protocol, which is federally required paperwork for human research describing our project, methods, and a lot of assurances on how we will handle the data and privacy of people in our study. After hundreds of emails, a few phone calls, 3 cycles of IRB review, and countless hours of writing and rewriting, we have received conditional approval for our 82 page IRB document! This means overall the project is approved on the condition that we fix up some minor details. This gives us confidence to proceed with placing the orders for Soylent and the uBiome kits.

In addition, UC Berkeley had its bi-annual student organization fair, Calapalooza, where we set up a booth and had our first public showcase of what we're doing.

 

Figure 1. Ryan and Dylan manning the booth.

 

Figure 2. Our booth with Soylent samples as bait.

There was a lot of interest, especially from engineers interested in Soylent for optimizing their lives and from biologists curious about the microbiome. We signed over 80 people up for our email list, well above our ~15 sample size. We are continuing to draw interest by giving short presentations in our classes and flyering on campus. In a few weeks, everybody will be invited to attend our first general meeting for a formal introduction to the study and the opportunity to sign an informed consent document and screening documents for participation in the study.

 

Figure 3. Mitchell explaining our project to an interested student.