Silver HP
For our Human Practice, we decided to investigate how we could turn our project into an actual marketable product, by carrying out a market research and eventually launching a startup.
We looked into business plans and strategies, to make a professional market research that could help other iGEM teams to turn their project into a start-up. We took our project as an example for everyone to have a concrete idea of what you need to start your own company.
We benefit from the experience of Shazzad Hossain Mukit, Prateek Garg and Sophie Gontier, from the iGEM Paris Bettencourt 2015 team, who took their project - Ferment it yourself - further to create Unibiome® a startup whose mission is to develop enhanced probiotic formulations to improve the nutritional value of fermented food.
In the end, after analyzing all of the data, we obtained very positive results about our product. The market for 3D printers is at an all time high, especially for bioprinters, which most consider as the future of the printing field.
About creating a startup
The experience of the founders of Unibiome was really valuable. As a previous iGEM team, they helped us understand better what are the concerns a new biotech startup will have to face. After several rounds of discussion with them, we were able to get a clearer idea of what any iGEMers eager to turn their projects into a startup have to consider.
First and foremost, you need to choose your partners carefully. It might not seem important, but if you are confident in building a startup, you have to know that it is a long journey, with ups and (a lot of) downs, therefore choosing a trusted coworker is critical, as you will be each other’s support. iGEM is a really good experience for that. You know how your teammates work and you have (probably) gone through tough times together, which really binds a team.
A Biotech startup team needs to have people falling into three specific types or categories: 1. scientific, 2. visionary/communicator, 3. and business development. It is a deep tech startup so obviously, the team needs to have a very strong scientific background, with the ability to break down problems into their constituent elements and solve issues accordingly. The visionary will need to have skeptical optimism, and generally turns out to be the leader of the team so he will have good (external) communication skills. The team must identify a very pragmatic business need for the technology they are developing. Spending one month just to understand the market and customers needs is way better than to be lost for months after carrying out R&D and trying to figure out the market/customers.
Generally, biotech startups launch out with a bottom-up approach: they have a technology in hand and now they want to start solving a specific problem and then try to expand to other areas. Unibiome® started from the top-down: they identified a problem and tried to solve it with their skills. However they failed to pull off significant results and couldn’t pin down the market need for their type of technology. A bottom-up approach has more reasons to succeed in the biotech scene as such startups generally tend to have IP over the tech as they built IT in-house. The top-down approach is better for non-profit or mature companies with a lot of IP security and tech in their hands. Or top-down may even work for DIY biotech lab projects.
Even if you have a novel technology in hand, challenges will arise such as - is the solution better compared to the existing ones? Better in the sense that- A. Will that new technology produce the product/medicine/device more cheaply or at a more competitive price compared to other existing solutions in the market? B. It is very unlikely in any technology in present world that you are working alone and nobody else is going to come/working on the same solution. So it is highly probable that soon you will be competing with another player in the same market niche. Better to identify your specific customer segments even before starting to go into R&D and product development and differentiate from your competitor. It will save a lot of time, energy and money. So a very thorough market research will save you months/years and a ton of money.
This can be described as "finding the right timing" for your startup. You may find out your idea is brilliant but you are either too late or too early to the market. By too early, we mean that there is a slippery slope for educating people while they are yet to understand and adopt the new tech in their daily life. Not every startup can like Apple dictate what people shall use. And you need to understand the trend too, Apple did not come up with the iPad suddenly and did not turn into a smartphone centered company from a computer manufacturer overnight. They studied the rising trends and the technology was already in the society and people were susceptible too, so startups need to understand whether the trend of people's lifestyle indicates that within the next few years they will adopt your technology or whether it’s just a fad, soon to go away or whether it is here to stay.
It is important to know the right amount to raise the money you may need. Biotech/deep tech is fundamentally different from any other web/app or service based startup. 50K for website startup may enough to deliver a minimal viable product (MVP) within 6 months, 50K for biotech is not even enough to run a lab of 4-5 people for 6 months. A minimal viable product is a product just enough developed to satisfy the first customers as well as providing feedback for the future product development. So when a generic startup accelerator says they will give you 50K for your biotech startup, they don't understand the difference between biotech and general tech and they have no idea of the cost to run a biotech company. Any amount that is less than the amount to give the biotech startup a runway for a year is nothing at all. In web/app, you can write the code for your product/make your product in a fab lab if not in weeks at least within few months, for biotech you are sure to face some failed experiment and that may cost your few months alone. So a seed or pre-seed round of 150-250K USD is the minimum to successfully finish the MVP part of a biotech product along with a provisional patent. This will help you to bring seed or Series A fund from investors. Less than this amount, your rate of failure is 90%.
And making an analogy between web/app and deep tech startup is fundamentally wrong. Biotech has issues of IP and patents, thus legality matters even in the beginning, whereas web startups have multiple options- open source, proprietary, copyright etc. Open source in the biotech product is not yet a reality. Maybe that exists in bioinformatics for some other tools, but not in living organisms or molecules. Another big thing is, web/app based startups can launch their products in the market within months or a year. Whereas in biotech this is a totally different ball game. If you are in medical biotech, good luck for the next 8-10 years! You won't be able to enter the market unless you have successfully finished pre-clinical, clinical trial phase 1, 2 and 3. The majority of drugs/biotech products don't pass Phase 2 and 3!
Even if you are in food biotech, better not sell GMOs directly to customers, however unholy and irrational the people's fear may seem. We cannot change people's mind overnight and considering there is a billion dollar lobby industry to push fear-mongering GMO agendas, the system is fundamentally broken. But there is a niche industry where you can sell GMOs to B2B customers as they use GMOs to produce "natural" compounds, for example, Vanillin by Evolva or vitamins by some biotech companies. Furthermore, food biotech does not exist, food and biotech is the worst combination to put together in front of customers considering their irrational fear. Though a lot of food companies use evolved or modified organisms in their food, they are super secretive or do not necessarily tell the truth.
Industrial biotechnology and gadget-based biotech have huge potential though, as they do not face the decade-long drag of medical biotech or GMO fear of food biotech. With the rising issue of climate change and trying to be independent of petrochemical-based material industry, industrial biotech/ green biotechnology will grow bigger and bigger.
Finally, becoming a startup founder is not for everyone. It is less glamorous than it seems, highly stressful and financially risky. Most of the time you will find yourself alone in your successes or failures, and you may have to swallow things you may never have imagined. But this a world of high risk, high gain. Knowing where you want to see yourself down the line after 5-10 years may help you to decide. Plus, thinking like an engineer may help too, break down all the problems to solve them one by one, and do it frequently, daily. If you are an initiator, problem solver, doer, go-getter from early childhood, that will help.
Our Market Research
With all of the above in mind, the first thing that was on our task list was to scope out the industry and size up the competition, so we started focusing on our market research. As primary research, we found surveys to be the best way to get the most information we needed, in a short amount of time.
Therefore we designed surveys for 3D printer users. Our goal with our surveys was, on one hand to better understand the place of the 3D printer inside of the technological arsenal of today, as well as where it will stand in the future. On the other hand, we wanted to understand how 3D printer users view the device, and why they use it.
Here is the most important information we collected from the surveys:
Our goal was to target the fablab community for two main reasons. The first one is that this community represents a lot of values we stand for: giving the means to people to create products and experiment in a creative way. This is something that would cost a lot of money if it wasn’t for fablabs and makerspaces. Moreover, this is such a huge community, represented all over the world, that by displaying our biomaterial 3D printer, it enables us to reach people all around.
We visited Fablab University Paris VII Diderot, La Paillasse, Pasteur Fablab, Le Petit Fablab de Paris, Usine IO, Volumes, WoMa, and we also interviewed David Sun Kong from the MIT Media Lab.
We picked those fablabs in particular because they are all very different, from the business incubator to the volunteer-run community fablab, and the people in charge had very different personal opinions about 3D printers, which made the interviews particularly interesting. We also notice that the type of customers varies according to the type of fablab/makerspace, thus we were able to target customers such as regulars, private individuals or companies.
We realised that professionals are actually very much divided on the importance of 3D printers. While some believe it’s an extraordinary machine that will keep on expanding and become indispensable in the future, others sees the device as overly hyped by the media and only used to produce prototypes. Thanks to our surveys, we orientated our questionnaire to talk with professionnals about what really matters to the consumers.
Data Extraction
The topology of communication between devices, as well as with the outside world via the Internet can be anything - from the simplest to the most complex. Everything is limited only by the imagination of the creator of such a system. However, even for the construction of a very simple system, a basic knowledge of programming is required, as well as the development of an algorithm for the functional system of a device.
To simplify the process of creating such a system, IBM engineers created a programming tool like Node-RED. It allows even a person with minimal programming skills to associate various IoT devices with each other and program their functional system. The convenience of this tool is that the algorithm itself can be built in the form of visual blocks, as well as the fact that in the Node-RED repository there is a huge number of already created modules that you can use without dismantling the documentation, but simply adding them to the program. Thus, you can bind different functional blocks simply with a mouse without using programming.
The programs created in Node-RED are stored using JSON and can be easily imported and exported for sharing with others.
The interface is divided into three main parts - a list of elements, a location for placing elements and properties of objects. Dragging items from the list, you can form the dependencies of the elements between each other, thus visually representing the logic of the program.
As an loT device we took Raspberry PI3 with OS Raspbian Jessi. We chose a single-board computer with wireless LAN and Bluetooth connectivity.
How does it to work?
Select the Inject element from the Input section and place it on the working field. We also place the TCP element from the Output section there and perform their connection simply by matching the corresponding gray dots with each other. You can also add a Debug element to control what exactly will be sent. It will look like this:
So based on this knowledge we build the program which allowed us to extract data from 3D printing websites.
Each branch represents one category from the site (https://pinshape.com/3d-marketplace). We compose a request to the REST service which provides data in JSON format. After that we connect all responses in the join step and give the result to the aggregator function which transforms data to the format needed to display charts on the specific dashboard page.
After the primary research where we collected all of the data, we could now switch to the secondary research by analyzing what extracted. We gained a better understanding of the use of the 3D printer, mostly the why, where and how. Identifying the market was the key for visualizing what our project would bring to society.
As a biomaterial 3D printer, we realized that such a device is still a bit avant-gardist, however consumers responded very well to the idea, and would like to know and understand more. Every fablab we talked to were willing to display our printer, as long as it safe to use. This is very encouraging for the future of our project and we hope that one day, we will be able to distribute our product to fablabs all over the world.
Safety
One of our main concern about our project was the safety issue. As we are using bacteria to make our biomaterial 3D printer, our work needs to be safe. This is why we implemented a cell-lysis system inside of our design. Therefore it is easy to activate the lysis and kill the cell. This was one of the biggest issues when creating the device.
Questions about safety systematically came up whether it was on the survey or during the interviews with the fablabs. Because we needed not only the opinion of 3D printer users, but also professional people, working with 3D printers.
We obtained very positive feedback. We had been afraid that people would be scared or wary towards our project, but it was surprising and gratifying to see that they were actually more intrigued and interested about what our printer could actually do.
To even go further with the safety issue, we went to Brussels, to the European Union headquarters and met with Dr. Namorado, a member of the ethical board in the EU’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. We discussed our project with her and explained our concern about safety. We reviewed together the EU’s Horizon 2020 ethical criteria and we made sure that our work was in compliance with it.
Environmental Impact
When designing our biomaterial 3D printer, we kept in mind the environmental impact. This is a very important side of our device, as we believe the era of plastic and other fossil-fuel based products is over. By working with 3 different biomaterials, produced by bacteria, we ensure that the end result will be totally biodegradable, and renewable by compost.
We took this essential parameter into account while developing the market research. Biomaterials will be a key elements of the products of the future, and we want to replace polluting materials with eco-friendly, biocompatible ones. It is morally imposs
