Team:Freiburg/Report BioCopy
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 told us that he applied and got accepted for an “Validierung von Innovationspotential” (validation of innovation potential = VIP) grant, a special funding programm of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany (BMBF). This VIP programm aims to support scientists to transfer their research, validate it for industrial applications and turn it into economic value.
He advised us “When you apply for funds you have to pay attention to the wording of the funding call. Some may be “verwertungsoffen” (meaning “commercial exploitation to be still open” , which imply that all ideas, rights and licences can not be licensed or sold whilst the project is running. Not even by you, the inventor.. And if you start a company based on those ideas, without the rights to use them, this will be worthless”. He further underlined the importance regarding patent and license protection: “It’s necessary that you protect your ideas by patents or have exclusive license rights. If you have a disruptive idea and you do not hold those rights, a big company will simply buy the patent and revoke your rights of usage. If you hold all the exclusive rights the big companies only have the options to buy your entire start-up or to close a deal with you. In the end your idea is useless without protection.”
He emphasized this is especially important for iGEM projects. Basically they should be free to use, but any clever idea can then be taken and used by any one. And if an additional idea is added, this can be patented. So a brave iGEM team, may have at the end not even the right to use their idea for a special, now patented, application. “So better protect first and then publish”, he advised us to be absolutely sure we protect our intellectual property before presenting our ideas in Boston. Ideally we should find an advisor for our potential company, who carries at least a doctoral degree, so potential investors are ensured the idea behind it is scientifically sound. He highlighted that, on our potential way to found a company, we could negotiate with the university to file for the patents while giving us an exclusive right to buy those.
Additionally Dr. Roth shared his experience supporting and working with an iGEM team “ We were about six people in the company, when we started to cooperate with the iGEM Team. Suddenly the amount of people working on our project quadrupled. Thus we had many people, who brought new aspects to BioCopy. Initially it was a lot of work to train them, but we saw it as a huge chance, which paid off in the end, as a whole product line developed from this cooperation. Still today I am sending the Link of Freiburgs 2015 iGEM-Wiki to potential partners and investors to show this basic work. And I would have hired the whole iGEM-Team, if we would have had the money back then.”
Further Roth believes that the university should also consider in their budget planning not only the direct support of a iGEM team, but also patent costs, to ensure that every project can be potentially protected. He also emphasized that the iGEM team should already in the beginning agree to the share distributions of publications, patent rights and even companies quite early to avoid later discussions and disputes: “If you end up starting a really successful company, which also has a huge value, you will have discussion even about 0.25 percent of the company.”
In the end we agreed to partner up and BioCopy came on board of our project as a gold sponsor!
