Team:NUS Singapore/Entrepreneurship
Overview
Our technology has the potential to underpin significant advances in synthetic biology. In this section, we detail the work we have done on investigating the market potential of our product. We sought advice and help from prominent startup incubators such as NUS Enterprise and SG Innovate, allowing us to get better insights into the commercial viability of our project. We analysed the competitive landscape, and detailed our value propositions and business models with various frameworks. Lastly, we conducted customer validation - the most important part of any business, and got positive affirmation from other synthetic biology companies such as FREDsense.
Background
Synthetic biology is poised to become a significant economic driver in the future. Engineered organisms are increasingly becoming more sophisticated, and are taking hold in various industries such as manufacturing and therapeutics. This advancing developments are now contributing and building towards what is known as the ‘bioeconomy’, whereby biotechnology is interconnected with economic development. The biotech market and the bioeconomy as a whole is now worth a staggering sum of over 2 trillion euros, and is poised to continue growing at a rapid rate, with synthetic biology playing a significant role. The synthetic biology industry is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26.0%, and expected to reach USD13.9 billion by 2022 (Bergin, 2018).
With this massive market in play, we as a team believe that to gain the biggest impact, we have to develop foundational technologies that can underpin the entire industry - a platform technology for synthetic biology. Thus, we decided that enabling an extended lifespan of engineered organisms, which is a key aspect underpinning most of synthetic biology, is an advance that would be beneficial to the entire market. We therefore saw the potential in our technology for commercialization, which led us to develop our market analyses and strategic direction to understand how we could bring our product into the market and benefit the entire synthetic biology industry.
Our Problem Statement
A major part of synthetic biology involves the construction of engineered organisms that possess unique functions. Significant successes , such as diagnostic bacteria for noninvasive testing, therapeutic delivery of drugs and direct treatment of diseases such as colitis, have been achieved by various groups around the world (Riglar & Silver, 2018). The success of engineered bacteria has not been limited to simply therapeutic or medicinal purposes, but also encompasses many different industries, such as in biomanufacturing and bioremediation, while being poised to make further inroads to other fields. However, one key bottleneck in the adoption of engineered organisms is that of their functional stability. It is difficult to maintain the desired function of the bacteria over time in their environmental context. In order to allow synthetic biology to continue its path forward, there is a need to extend the sustainability of such organisms and similarly have a better control over its function.
SWOT ANALYSIS
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Existing Solutions
Cryopreservation is one of the most long-established methods of preserving cellular viability for a longer term. Commonly used across both academia and industry, the field is well studied and many different organizations have established their own unique protocols for storing their bacterial cultures at a low temperature to reduce bacterial activity and protect proteins and DNA from degradation by cellular water activity and other metabolic processes (Prakash, Nimonkar, & Shouche, 2013).
The main advantage of cryopreservation is the long-lasting and relatively well understood mechanisms behind its function. Various cryoprotectants have been developed to ensure the stability of the cell after it has been stored, and the freezing and reviving of the cell is, while sensitive, a relatively simple procedure. This method of preservation can also be applied to many different types of cells provided the appropriate conditions are observed.
On the other hand, cryopreservation requires the constant supply of coolant, be it from liquid nitrogen or an electronic refrigerator. These raises the cost of preservation dramatically as it is heavily dependent on infrastructure for its function. It is difficult to utilize in use cases whereby the cold chain cannot be easily maintained, such as in rural and remote areas. This limits the use of cryopreservation to well-developed and maintained industrial and laboratory settings, preventing us from utilizing the full potential of engineered bacteria in different environmental conditions.
Lyophilization, or freeze-drying, is a process in which organisms are desiccated either by drying or by vacuum into an inert powdered formulation, which can then be reconstituted upon the addition of liquid media or nutrients. Techniques for this process have been well established, and it is currently known to be the longest lasting form of preservation. It is also relatively easy to maintain and transport the dried culture as it can just be kept at room temperature and in a dry environment, with little equipment necessary. Groups such as the Choi group from Binghamton University have developed paper-based bio-batteries using lyophilized electrophilic bacteria that can generate electricity upon reconstitution (Gao, Mohammadifar, & Choi, 2019).
However, specialized equipment is required to conduct the lyophilization process, and the reconstituted bacteria are usually less viable compared to fresh cells - with approximately half the initial activity and viability. Furthermore, the lyophilization process is relatively harsh, and many types of bacterial are unable to undergo the process and stay viable upon reconstitution, severely limiting the scope of lyophilization as a method of enabling longevity. In addition, lyophilization does not directly improve the longevity of active bacteria in their environment, making it an unappropriate method for any use case requiring a continuous culture of bacteria.
Continuous reactors or chemostats have the advantage of constantly providing nutrients as well as flushing away toxic waste materials. This leads to increased predictability of the system as there is minimal variation occurring in the medium in which the cell grows in, allowing for a tighter control of cell growth (Matteau, Baby, Pelletier, & Rodrigue, 2015).
However, these systems are exceedingly limited in their scope. They are most suitable for biomanufacturing purposes due to the scale of the process enabling the cost-effective construction of a complex bioreactor. For many smaller scale applications such as living biosensors, where only a small volume of cells are needed and high levels of protein expression are secondary, a continuous flow system is too costly and unsuitable. These also require the bacteria to be isolated within an engineered chamber, which prevents them for being used in the larger environment. They also necessitate continued maintenance to ensure that they function as intended. In addition, due to the continued growth of the cell, constant divisions occur, accelerating mutation rates and increasing unpredictability in cellular behavior (Bull & Barrick, 2017).
Furthermore, these systems are difficult to miniaturize due to the complexity of creating appropriate microfluidic channels, and are similarly difficult to mass produce on a large scale. Significant engineering is required in order to develop appropriate systems for each use case, limiting the broad adoption of such devices.
With the advent of many genomic technologies such as CRISPR and the presence of stalwarts such as the Lambda red recombinase systems, chromosomal knock-ins of specific genomes have long been an alternative to plasmid-based solutions for protein production (Mosberg, Lajoie, & Church, 2010). Furthermore, there are recent developments in the CRISPR field allowing for the recombination of larger genes by utilizing transposon-based methods, which further expands the field for including larger and larger DNA sequences (Klompe, Vo, Halpin-Healy, & Sternberg, 2019).
However, these methods are still limited by their difficult execution - chromosomal knock-ins are much more inefficient due to having to alter the existing genome of the cells in vivo. Furthermore, they suffer from a lowered rate of production due to the lower copy number compared to a plasmid-based system. There is also some measure of unpredictability due to the direct alteration of the genome, and the system is less modular as every strain and species of bacteria or higher-order organisms would require clear understanding of the genome in order to determine the appropriate placement of the desired gene. Unwanted interactions are also much more likely to occur as compared to plasmid-based sequences.
Encapsulation involves the use of various materials, such as hydrogels or capsules, to store engineered organisms. These could also be in the form of a device housing said organisms. Such encapsulated systems protect the organism from changes in the external environment, granting them resistance to harm. These thus provides engineered organisms a chance to live longer and fulfil their functions. Encapsulated devices are also highly customizable and can be constructed for specific environments and contents. They can be designed to segregate individual components, allowing for spatial and temporal control of the activity of encapsulated organisms (Trantidou, Dekker, Polizzi, Ces, & Elani, 2018).
This method has significant promise in extending the functionalities of engineered organisms. However, they are still in essence a closed-batch system, and thus the problems of sustainability still remain to be solved by this method. Furthermore, it is not simple to manufacture appropriate encapsulation methods that are compatible with both the engineered organism, as well as the external environment.
E.co LIVE
Our technology involves the usage of plasmid-based genetic modifications that are easy to manipulate. These systems are simple to utilize for molecular biologists, and do not require significant equipment or costs to handle and use.
In addition, our unique value proposition is that we lower the metabolism of the cell in situ. For cryopreservation and encapsulation, the cells have to be kept in a specific environment and maintained in that environment. Furthermore, none of the available methods for preserving cellular function are able to both control the metabolic activity of the cell in their desired working environment. Lyophilization, agar stabs and cryopreservation are all ‘one-time’ uses, in the sense that they are suitable for preserving shelf-life rather than in situ functionality. Encapsulation enables the bacteria to survive better in the environment, but are difficult to engineer and have to be functionalized to enable control of bacterial activity. Our system allows for in situ control of cellular metabolism and protein production, extending the use of engineered bacteria in their final environment.
Our systems are also modular, with the ability to swap in and out various control, production and metabolic regulatory modules. These provide significant functionality to scientists seeking to engineer cells for specific purposes in specific environments with specific triggers.
Competitor Analysis Perceptual Map
BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
Click on our interactive Business Model Canvas (BMC) to see the comparison between our initial and final canvases. Read on to see the rigorous process we went through to arrive at our final BMC.
The Customer Validation Process
Our initial concept was that we have a platform technology that can be scaled to various industries in synthetic biology, in particular towards organism engineering. Organism engineering is one of the most promising areas of synthetic biology, with a big demand for the engineering of cells which can conduct specific functions, ranging from engineered T-cells for personalized cancer treatments to developing smart living materials that can respond intelligently to the environment (Khalil & Collins, 2010). As such, significant investment has been made into companies developing such engineered organisms. One major company in this field is that of Ginkgo Bioworks, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Valued at over USD$1 billion, it is one of the most prominent synthetic biology companies around, and their focus is on the designing of engineered organisms for individualized purposes, ranging from therapeutic cells to creating artificial food proteins. Zymergen, another company keeping their organism engineering technology under wraps, have recently raised USD$400 million worth of funding to bring their total capital raised to USD$574 million, showing again the immense investment and business capital available to this field of synthetic biology in particular (Bomgardner, 2018).
As such, the area of organism engineering is one of the most established and prominent fields of synthetic biology, which makes the available market size significantly higher for potential growth. Their ability to turn profits and obtain large-scale impact also allows for them to take more risks in implementing newer technologies and ventures. This is evidenced by Ginkgo Bioworks’ development of their fourth foundry for mammalian cell engineering, the hardest area of cellular engineering; as well as in their collaborations with traditional agricultural companies such as Bayer in their spin-off Joyn Bio.
However, the initial canvas was all based on our concepts and assumptions. In order to understand whether these assumptions are valid, we decided to use the prevailing concept in this era of startups and fast-scaling businesses: the Lean Startup methodology.
This concept purports to provide a systematic manner for businesses to search for a viable business model and thus scale towards a sustainable and profitable business (Blank, 2013). While the method is now the default in the tech startup culture, it is starting to be adopted by many other industries and businesses due to its rapid and iterative nature, suitable for our current, ever-changing world.
Synthetic biology has embraced this methodology in recent years. One aim of synthetic biology is to enable the application of engineering to biology - to the extent of making biology itself an engineering problem. Thus, the Lean Startup methodology, with its concept of the Design-Build-Test-Learn (DBTL) cycle and the creation of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test the product out as fast as possible and understand the variability in the system, was widely embraced by synthetic biologists (Flores Bueso & Tangney, 2017).
As such, organisations dedicated to the engineering of biology and the integration of technology with biology have sprung up in recent years. We decided that our technology could play a role as another cog in the goal to enhance predictability in engineering biology. These concepts then guided us throughout our project, and you can find our implementations of the DBTL cycle here as well as our MVP in the Demonstrate section of our wiki.
Fig. 1: The DBTL Cycle in synthetic biology.
In this section, we detail the process we went through with customer validation and business advice, and show how the project was indeed shaped by the various subject matter experts we have spoken to over the course of iGEM. These inched us ever closer to our final business model, which will be detailed in the final canvas below.Customer Validation
In the initial stages of our iGEM ideation and proposal, we came up with the concept of hibernating cells to enable regulated protein production and presented to Profs Kitney and Freemont, who are stalwarts in the UK synthetic biology economy as co-directors of SynbiCITE and possess significant ties to the industry at large. We hoped to pitch our idea as a platform technology, a foundational advance for synthetic biology as a whole. This is reflected in our initial business model canvas above, which was tailored to a broad market.
The professors were very encouraging and gave us useful feedback on the possible applications of our project. They suggested bioluminescence as a possible demonstration of our technology, and encouraged us to approach domain experts to understand more on how we can solve their problems. With that in mind, we conceptualized the use of our product in multiple areas such as biomanufacturing, therapeutics, bioluminescence and biosensing, and set out seeking feedback on these sources.
Prashant is a PhD student in Prof Poh's lab, and he is a Nepalese who has knowledge of the lighting issues faced by rural areas of his home country. He informed us that bioluminescence could possibly be useful in rural areas, but current solutions such as solar lamps are long lasting and are cheap enough for people to use.
Similarly, the Universitas Indonesia team provided us with a knowledge of the unlighted regions of Indonesia. While the area was substantial, the Indonesian government was already rolling out solutions such as solar panels. As a result of these interviews and interactions, we concluded that bioluminescence, while attractive and easily understood, might not be a suitable market to develop a business on. We thus decided to pivot towards other areas, while using bioluminescence as a way of demonstrating the effect of our technology instead.
In our research, we realized that whole-cell biosensors, while demonstrating a lot of promise and utility, is one area of engineered organisms that is severely hampered in viability by its lack of sustainability. Thus, we sought to validate this hypothesis by speaking to people working in this field. We across FREDsense as it stemmed from a previous iGEM team, and we thought that they could provide us with some guidance on how we can commercialize our technology based on their own experience.
We spoke with Emily, the CEO of FREDsense, and gained significant insights into how our technology could benefit FREDsense and biosensor technologies as a whole. She validated our hypothesis that such technologies are limited by their short operating timespan, and further provided us with another problem which we could solve. This was the problem of increasing the shelf-life of bacteria, which they were currently forced to employ a cold-chain for. She further validated our experimental scheme of using Lux as a demonstrative set of data, and advised us to continue working on our product and getting solid data before approaching her once more. The validation provided by her served to motivate us further and proved that our technology could indeed have an immediate real-world application. Click here to download our entrepreneurship letter.
NUS Enterprise is the venture arm of NUS. They are responsible for assisting in the commercialization of research done by NUS staff and students. As a result, we sought to gain their opinion on our project and get mentorship on how we could shape our idea towards a sustainable business.
We presented our project to them in its nascent stage, and obtained valuable feedback. These included refining the value propositions, as well as focusing the scope to enable us to quickly find a niche. They provided us mentorship in the form of Mr Kris Childress, who was invaluable in shaping our project towards one that helped us conceptualize our idea in a easy-to-understand yet descriptive fashion. This was the concept of us creating an 'on-off' switch, which we immediately adopted as our descriptive term due to how accurately it captured our project. He further walked us through various frameworks such as the value proposition canvas and the business model canvas, educating us in their usage and enabling us to further refine our business plans.
To understand the possible use of our technology in the biomanufacturing sector, we approached companies such as Conagen, who are leaders in the field of fermentation biomanufacturing of various natural products. Dr. Matteo Mattozzi, a manager of Scientific Operations at Conagen, was kind enough to provide his feedback.
After listening to the concept of the project, he was intrigued, but could not see how it could be directly applicable to biomanufacturing as a whole. This is so as the industry usually wants to mass produce its products at the highest efficiency, rather than trying to extend the usable lifespan of the cell. As a result, we decided to pivot away from the biomanufacturing sector as a use-case and focused on other applications, such as biosensors.
Dr Poh is currently an entrepreneur-in-residence in Duke-NUS, and was the co-founder of a startup aiming to improve the efficacy and distribution of vaccines. We sought to gain his opinion as a biotech entrepreneur and obtain insights into how one should run a biotech startup.
He gave us valuable knowledge drawn from his experience as a founder. He advised us on the appropriate use of the business model canvas by emphasizing on how it should be specific to each market we are targeting. He also provided information on regulatory pathways, explaining the rules he had to follow when developing his previous startup in the therapeutic space. This led us to emphasize less on the usage of our technology in the therapeutic field, given the longer time-to-market as well as the general pessimism of the public towards genetically-modified therapeutics.
We presented to SG Innovate, a Singaporean firm dedicated to bringing deep-tech startup in Singapore to fruition. This meeting was instrumental in us deciding to focus on one particular use case as a business model, despite us being a platform technology. The CEO of SG Innovate, Steve Leonard, provided insightful feedback on portraying a key problem that clicks with people immediately, and gave us the impetus to move towards the field of biosensors. He suggested we substantiate our market by looking into what is happening on the front pages, and also by considering which market would be the simplest to enter without having to overcome significant regulatory hurdles.
The group as a whole were very intrigued by our project, and suggested that we conduct further research into the many markets and choose one to make a strong economic and business case for. They provided us with an understanding of what investors in deep-tech companies would look for in a deep-tech startup, and further validated our key concept of the ‘ON/OFF’ switch.
VALUE PROPOSITION CANVAS
Fig. 2: The Value Proposition Canvas. Image obtained from strategyzer.com.
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TARGET MARKET ANALYSIS
We initially started out with the intention to position ourselves as a platform technology, being a foundational advance that we felt could benefit multiple applications. While we still believe that we could support multiple types of engineered organisms in their sustainability, for a viable business model, it is difficult to immediately try and target multiple markets. As suggested by many advisors, and taking a leaf from Ginkgo Biowork's approach in targeting scents and fragrances as an initial market for what is ostensibly a platform technology, we have thus decided to focus on implementing our technology in the whole-cell biosensors market.
Biosensors as a significant and growing market
Biosensors are a group of products encompassing many industries, from environmental monitoring to diagnostics. They are in essence a type of equipment or device made to measure either biological markers or comprising of biological components. They are a huge market, with a $USD28.78 billion market size as of 2014 with a CAGR of 14.0%, and USD$11.53 billion in revenue in that same year. It is considered a growing market, and is projected to continue growing towards a market size of USD$33.76 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 8.1% (Press, 2019; Frost & Sullivan, 2015). All in all, this growth is largely driven by various technological advances such as the development of new biosensors incorporating flexible electronics and increasing miniaturization and portability.
The various industries that biosensors play a role in vary greatly. Some important industries whereby biosensors will play an increasingly large role in include the healthcare and agricultural industry, along with current fields such as consumer goods. In healthcare, which is the main driver of biosensor usage comprising almost 99% of the market in 2010, significant advances have been made in the development of health monitoring kits such as glucose monitors and various test kits. Diagnostics also encompass this field, with many different diagnostic kits for varying biomarkers being developed and pushed out. Similarly, in the industry of environmental monitoring, biosensors are playing an increasingly important role to determine the toxicity and biological makeup of various environments (Scognamiglio et al., 2010).
The main advantages of biosensors in these fields are manifold. Firstly, they have a relatively fast response time, as the readout tends to be immediate such as via a fluorescent or piezoelectric reading. Relatively little post-processing of the sample or the data has to be conducted, as compared to other technologies such as a GC-MS or HPLC analytical sample. Secondly, they are very much portable and cost-effective technologies. Many biosensors are small and do not require electricity, and thus less costs in terms of equipment is necessary. Most of the costs come upstream in the production of the biosensor itself. One caveat to this is that most biosensors are sensitive to temperature and environmental conditions, which therefore necessitates the usage of infrastructure such as a cold chain for transport or preprocessing techniques such as encapsulation or lyophilization to increase viable shelf-life.
The biosensor market is further divided into varying fields, such as nanoprobes and microfluidic-based sensors. One substantial field is that of the whole-cell biosensor. In comparison to other types of biosensors such as cell-free systems and traditional electrical sensors, whole-cell biosensors have the advantage of being less costly and more able to respond to changes. They are also able to detect biomolecules with high sensitivity and specificity, along with the ability to integrate complex signals and logic systems. They can self-replicate and are also able to complement other biosensor systems by interfacing with various electronic or microfluidic devices (Courbet, Endy, Renard, Molina, & Bonnet, 2015; Raut, O’Connor, Pasini, & Daunert, 2012). However, the main factor holding back the widespread adoption of whole-cell biosensors is their low sustainability and tolerance to the in situ environment, as well as their general stochastic behavior leading to variability in their response to specific biomarkers. Hence, there has been significant efforts made to increase the effectiveness of engineered whole-cell biosensors over a sustained period of time (Bjerketorp, Håkansson, Belkin, & Jansson, 2006). Yet, the current solutions available for this are limited in scope. We therefore aim to solve this problem with our technology, enabling whole-cell biosensors to reach their fullest potential.
Market Segmentation
We believe that out of the total potential biosensor market, whole-cell based biosensors can fulfil a large segment of that market. In the therapeutic segment of this market, which comprises a majority of the uses, whole-cell biosensors can fulfil various roles such as being in situ diagnostics for multiple diseases. While whole-cell biosensors are still some time off from the market, thus making actual predictions for the potential market share it might obtain difficult, it can be assumed that such sensors, with their main advantages in fast, continuous and simple diagnostics, could possibly enter into the glucose monitoring market. This market is estimated alone to make up USD$14.68 billion by 2022 (Adrian, 2018), which will be our Total Addressable Market (TAM). Assuming a market share of 1% for whole-cell based biosensors, our Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and for our technology to be adopted by 10% of available whole-cell based biosensors to take up, we estimate a Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) of USD$14.68 million.
TIMELINE AND PROJECTIONS
Overview
We are acutely aware that our technology is still very much a nascent and premature one. Based on the Technology Readiness Level Framework, we have demonstrated the first viabiliy of our system, putting us at approximately TRL3 or TRL4. We therefore have our first minimum viable product. However, given that most technologies are only marketable at TRLs 5 and above, there is still much work to be done before we can push our product out into the market. Similarly, our target consumers, which are companies manufacturing microbial biosensors, are very much novel to their own general biosensor market, making our venture much more reliant on initial venture capital funding to fund partnerships that can then generate revenue further down the road.
Fig. 3: An illustration of the Technology Readiness Level Framework. E.co LIVE is currently situated at TR3, having demonstrated an experimental Proof of Concept in the lab.
Thus, we firstly aim to validate our project further and better understand the capabilities and limitations of our technology. At the same time, we want to further explore the market for our product and source for potential customer evangelists to assist us in product validation. We will join programmes such as the GRIP hosted by NUS Enterprise, in which early-stage technologies are pushed through an intense 3 month validation process to find a sustainable business model. These programmes similarly provide funding after completion, as well as access to future funding sources such as VCs and angel investors, which would be crucial to continue R&D work on the project. Subsequently, in order to scale, we would likely have to begin looking at global markets due to the small size of the Singaporean market. With over 75% of the global biosensor markets predicted to be in both Europe and the US by 2021, the share of the Singaporean market is a small percentage of the forecasted 11.8% for the Asia-Pacific region (Frost & Sullivan, 2015). Thus, we intend to seek the assistance of NUS Enterprise in approaching international investors, who can bring in their local networks along with additional funds. These are crucial in allowing us to access those global markets. We will also apply for international patents to increase the defensibility of our product to external competitors, as well as allow for us to become a more attractive investment option. At the same time, we will initiate meetings with regulatory personnel to gain a better understanding of the potential regulations we would have to comply with. This will allow us to undergo the appropriate quality tests to ensure the safe use of our product, while preventing us from spending time and effort doing unnecessary work. Engaging the various experts present in NUS, along with key organizations such as SG Innovate, the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore, the GMAC, NUS Industrial Liaison Office and NUS Enterprise, would provide us with significant help on this front. The immediate aim we seek to achieve is to seek for further customers in our market. Given that we are a business-to-business service, networks and contacts in the synthetic biology community will be important to get our key customers. Thus, we aim to make our presence known in this community, by going to synthetic biology academic and industrial conferences, holding outreach events, and collaborating extensively with both academics and industrial partners. This will increase our standing in the community, giving us further exposure to our potential customers. In the long run, we view our technology as a platform, enabling the sustained activity of any smart biosystem. We thus intend to build up capital and expertise in the biosensors market, which we believe we can be of immediate use with companies such as FREDsense providing positive affirmation. Subsequently, we can use the accrued experience and capital to branch into more difficult yet larger markets, such as in situ therapeutics. This will provide us with further investment potential. While we believe that in the short to medium term we can run lean and be a small yet effective company, to scale up and truly affect larger markets such as therapeutics would require a significantly longer runway. Thus, we will also seek an exit via an acquisition by other companies seeking to engineer cells such as Ginkgo Bioworks and Zymergen, folding our technology into their cellular engineering platform. This will allow us to most effectively get our work into the hands of users, ultimately benefiting synthetic biology as a whole.Marketing, Branding and Distribution Channels
Our technology, being a fundamental advancement that underpins consumer-facing products, is in essence a business-to-business product. Thus, to effectively reach our desired customers, which are synthetic biology companies, significant effort has to be put into customer acquisition. Pitch decks have to be developed to specific customers and their individual engineered organism(s) in question, and specialists would likely have to be assigned to those companies to assist in the integration of our systems.
In marketing our product, we draw inspiration from the immensely successful branding campaign run by Intel - their eponymous 'Intel Inside' campaign (Kotler, Pfoertsch, Kotler, & Pfoertsch, 2010). Intel is in a similar position to us, with their product being a component that is for all intents and purposes unknown in a customer-facing product. The function of the Intel Inside campaign served to provide a way to instill a sense of reliability and effectiveness in the product by linking their semiconductor chip to the final product. This created immense value for both Intel as well as the product manufacturers, in this case PC manufacturers such as Dell, by raising the profile of PCs with that particular logo. We can thus use this similar strategy for our product branding, marketing it to our target customers (i.e. engineered organism development companies) as a stamp of quality and sustainability that will be preferentially accepted by their customers (i.e. industries commissioning engineered organisms). This thus generates demand from the bottom up, enabling us to drive successful adoption of our product.
5-Year Projections
References
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Bjerketorp, J., Håkansson, S., Belkin, S., & Jansson, J. K. (2006). Advances in preservation methods: Keeping biosensor microorganisms alive and active. Current Opinion in Biotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2005.12.005
Blank, S. (2013). Why the lean start-up changes everything. Harvard Business Review.
Bomgardner, M. M. (2018, December 14). Zymergen rakes in $400 million for engineered microbes. Chemical and Engineering News. Retrieved from https://cen.acs.org/business/biobased-chemicals/Zymergen-rakes-400-million-engineered/96/web/2018/12
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Kotler, P., Pfoertsch, W., Kotler, P., & Pfoertsch, W. (2010). Intel Inside – The Ingredient Branding Success Story. In Ingredient Branding. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04214-0_3
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Press. (2019). Biosensors Market Size Worth $33.76 Billion By 2026 | CAGR 8.1%. Retrieved from https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-biosensors-market
Raut, N., O’Connor, G., Pasini, P., & Daunert, S. (2012). Engineered cells as biosensing systems in biomedical analysis. Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-012-5756-6
Riglar, D. T., & Silver, P. A. (2018). Engineering bacteria for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Nature Reviews Microbiology. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro.2017.172
Scognamiglio, V., Pezzotti, G., Pezzotti, I., Cano, J., Buonasera, K., Giannini, D., & Giardi, M. T. (2010). Biosensors for effective environmental and agrifood protection and commercialization: From research to market. Microchimica Acta. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-010-0313-5
Frost & Sullivan. (2015). Analysis of the Global Biosensors Market.
Trantidou, T., Dekker, L., Polizzi, K., Ces, O., & Elani, Y. (2018). Functionalizing cell-mimetic giant vesicles with encapsulated bacterial biosensors. Interface Focus. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2018.0024