Team:INSA-UPS France/test/description
iGEM UPS-INSA Toulouse 2017
Entrepreneurship
With such an innovative system of synthetic communication between microorganisms dedicated to the fight against cholera, an ongoing issue, it would be a shame not to exploit it to save lives. In that part of the project, our team developed an approach to commercialize our system. To achieve that, we first gathered testimonies on two topics: how to set up its company and how can we best adapt and optimize our system to the current situation of cholera. We therefore met people that have created their own company in the biotechnologies field or that are used in business development (Marc Lemonnier from the start-up Antabio, Pierre Monsan from Toulouse White Biotechnology, Pierre-Alain Hoffmann from the CRITT Bio-Industrie), people that developed their business to treat water, especially from V. cholerae (Christophe Campéri-Ginestet from Sunwaterlife), people from NGOs that daily face cholera (Claire Salvador from Doctors Without Borders and Alama Keita from UNICEF) and finally, more generally to Westerners.
These enriching discussions have helped us analyzed the cholera situation and market. We have been able to define more clearly and precisely the specificities to which our system and the device must respond. A scope statement has thus been established, detailing the points to which our product must answer.
Then, we had to think in concrete terms the device following as closely as possible the scope statement: How best to contain GMOs? How to make a device user-friendly? What materials can be used to combine quality and price? After asking these questions, the device containing our system was modeled in 3D.
Commercialize a novel system for saving lives
