Team:TU Dresden/Entrepreneurship
Beaming Biobricks from Space...
Project DipGene
The Journey
A GLOBAL PROBLEM
The limited accessibility and affordability of DNA-sequence specific test is a problem of global scale, not only for those who are forced by these limitations to live in uncertainty about predisposition of genetic diseases of loved ones and themselves but also for life science researchers in their daily work in the laboratory.
OUR SOLUTION
We designed a fast, cheap, and easy to use tool that can be applied anywhere by anyone and is able to detect any nucleic acid sequence of interest.
ENGINEERING CYCLE
As in the development of every scientific engineering problem, we went through a series of iteartive cycles not only in the design of our big problem, but also in solving the many small subproblems that occured on our way.
INTEGRATED HUMAN PRACTICES
Since most genetic disease show symptoms with increasing age, therefore senior people are our stakeholders and it was a great experience to adapt our project to this unique group. Since our example gene to test for was the SRY-gene we also invited representatives of the local transgender community to talk about our project.
RAISING AWARENESS
We did not only present on several science slams and other big public events, wrote articles for several newpapers and blogs, to spread the word of iGEM and synthetic biology, but we also organized the first-ever lab- and institute-discovery tour especially for people of advanced age. Because there is far too little done to make science accessible to those who could benefit best from ist medical advances.
our great sponsors
We are proudly sponsored by the following partners in science:
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Entrepreneurship
Best Supporting Entrepreneurship Special Prize
The Best Supporting Entrepreneurship award recognizes exceptional effort to build a business case and commercialize an iGEM project. This award is open to all teams to show that entrepreneurship is something all teams can aspire to do with their project. This award can go to an new project, or to a previous project that a team aimed to commercialize. Have you filed a provisional patent on your project/device/process? Have you raised money to build and ship products? Have you pitched your idea to investors and received money? As always in iGEM, the aim is to impress the judges!
To compete for the Best Supporting Entrepreneurship prize, please describe your work on this page and also fill out the description on the judging form.
You must also delete the message box on the top of this page to be eligible for this prize.
Inspiration
You can look at what other teams did to get some inspiration!
Here are a few examples:
Patents and intellectual property
If your team is seriously considering commercializing and looking into building a company after the competition, you may want to look at how you are going to protect your work and secure investment. Investors will usually require some form of intellectual protection, so you may want to investigate how to apply for a patent or provisional patent in your country and region before disclosing your project at iGEM. Remember that you can only be evaluated in iGEM based on what you share on your wiki and at the Jamboree, so any work you don't present can't count towards your project.
This is an area where we are different as we care about sharing, openness and contributing to the community and investors don't always agree with these values. It is up to you and your team to decide what to do. Remember that most universities have a commercialization department and that you can talk to them before coming to a decision.