Thank you! 💖
We are just astonished and amazed by all the support we have been getting from you! 😍 Thanks to over 100 contributors we made it to our minimum funding goal in just a bit over a week! 🎉 We wanted to thank you all so much for your contributions – financial, moral and by spreading the words with your friends and networks – without all of your support this would not have been possible! 👏🏳️🌈
What now? 🤔
Reaching the minimum funding goal already allows us to go ahead with this study on the smallest possible level: Right now we can start working with 20 participants as we can now afford to process this number of samples.
But, while looking at 20 different neo-vaginal samples isn't bad for pilot study like ours, we hope to be able to work with even more participants: First of all, this would allow us to get a more diverse sample – something that's particularly important because of the large number of different techniques used for gender-affirmation surgeries. Secondly, the community feedback has shown us that there's a real interest and need to go into more detail. Indeed, in the last week alone nearly 30 people reached out to work with us!
Help us get to the optimum 📈🙏
We already got the ethical approval and basic materials that are needed to scale up our study to up to 50 participants. But as processing the microbial samples for each participant isn't cheap, we need your help: The sample processing step includes a) extracting the microbial DNA b) preparing it for sequencing and c) the actual sequencing step. The cost for this processing is around 140€ per participant.
Please, continue to spread the word and contribute to our work – so that we can collectively make an even bigger impact! 💪🏳️🌈💪
Canle 
