Team:Freiburg/Entrepreneurship
Academia to industry
We established a powerful and fast in silico method to predict binding D-ligand to almost any given target within a week. Additional methods allow us to simulate the binding affinity and further optimization of our ligands. While this has a disruptive character already, we chose to demonstrate a proof of concept with MRSA. As explained for our project, MRSA has a huge impact on society and also a billion dollar market.
We will describe, how our idea evolved from our daily work in the laboratory to the filling of a patent of our binding ligands.
Companies & Events
During iGEM we had the chance to interview Dr. Günter Roth, the founder of “BioCopy”. BioCopy won several prices and received several million Euro as investments . BioCopy enables finding new vaccine precursors within several days instead of several months and further enables copying of proteins and DNA. The company partnered with the previous iGEM Team Freiburg from 2015 and several old iGEMers work for them now.
Thus we informed ourselfs, how an iGEM team could profit from working with a start-up, but also gained knowledge how a start-up can profit supporting iGEM and iGEMers. Dr. Roth explained us what obstacles he had to overcome after starting his company. Further he mentioned options where and how we could possibly apply for funding. In the end we agreed to partner up and BioCopy went on board of our project as a gold sponsor!
We met with Prof. Dr. Willbold, who is the co-founder and chair of the supervisory board of Priavoid. Priavoid is a company, which aims to bring the first all-D-amino acid peptide drug for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease on the market. But also for other neurodegenerative diseases, the company develops different all-D-peptide drugs. The compound that was developed against Alzheimer’s disease has proven to be effective in four different animal models in four different laboratories. Furthermore, clinical phase I studies demonstrated its safety for humans. With their concept, Priavoid targets a 20 billion dollar market. After receiving seed investment and earning different prices, Priavoid requires a 30 Million-Dollar investment to continue with the next phase of clinical trials. During our interview, we asked him what we should do, if we should find a binding ligand during our project. Since we did find binding ligands, we could apply the lessons we learned from him. Furthermore, we discussed the development of his country and aspects, to which you have to pay attention, if you want to start a company based on your academic research.
We had the chance to attend the Q-Summit at the University of Mannheim. Q-Summit is a meet-up between start ups, investors, major companies (for example Facebook or PwC) and young talents. It's goal is to bring people with great ideas together. While we had an amazing experience to talk with other young talents, who will shape the future, we had a lot of lively discussions about the possibilities, which synthetic biology may offer and how it may impact the biotechnology sector in the future. Additionally we attended various workshops, gained insights to what we should pay attention, while we're searching for funding. At Q-Summit, we had the chance to pitch our project in front of hundreds of people and learned which aspects could be interesting for industry. We also met Anja Feldmann from the company BASF SE, the world biggest chemistry company, with whom we agreed to stay in touch to cooperate further.
After meeting Mrs. Feldmann at the Q-Summit, we stayed in touch and BASF offered us to presented our project (WebEx-meeting) as soon as it’s close to finishing. We took this chance and presented our project in front of leading experts of BASF. After a Q&A session we realized our project could have further impacts, for example by applying it on lifestocks. BASF encouraged us that we should definetely expand our project after iGEM and urged us to stay in touch, so we can eventually cooperate further in the future. After realizing that major companies are interested in our project and the ideas and workflows behind it, we started discussing if we should possibly patent our ligands, in case we start a comapy afterwards.
SWOT Analysis
