Team:IISER-Mohali/Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship
While inspired by the struggles faced by small farmers suffering from post harvest losses, FearOmone’s application has a wider audience - office places, cafeterias, stationery stores, home kitchens, and hospitals all environments which need to be kept murine free. This makes our product’s consumer base a large one, with the same need, albeit to different extents and in different conditions. This doesn’t complicate our business model, thanks to our patent pending technologies: EFFUSE, TOMCAT variants, and RATTEL. However, we seek to maximize our profit margin, while maintaining the conflicting interest of making FearOmone affordable to small farmers and individual buyers. The only way to achieve this would be to mass produce FearOmone production, with a factory setup for mass production. This would greatly reduce production costs.
The BioReactor: Taking FearOmone to the masses
On an industrial scale, the manufacturing costs of TOMCAT/TOMCAT+ would eventually saturate, since these devices are recyclable, except for the membrane filter (which emphasizes the eco friendliness of our product). However, the greatest FearOmone yield would come from large scale cell lysis, which TOMCAT/TOMCAT+ aren’t capable of doing. For this purpose, we plan on utilizing a continuous and batch fed combination Bioreactor, along with subsequent downstream processing to extract our final product – cell free FearOmone. This FearOmone will be filled into High-Pressure Sprays or infused into hydrogel for delayed release, on a large scale. This would also be compatible with existing PSU employment policies, where workers’ jobs would not be replaced by devices, rather, existing rodenticides would be replaced with this technology.
Government subsidies for farmers
Considering our original target audience was farmers and society at large, we feel obliged to stick to our values. Given the benefits of FearOmone, we’re confident that the Government would be willing to assist our efforts. Several subsidy schemes will be available to make FearOmone affordable for small farmers. Extending FearOmone to new pest/predator pairs If the science behind FearOmone is valid
The entrepreneurship prize 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 a 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? Complete the entrepreneurship section on the Judging form and tell us what you did. As always in iGEM, the aim is to impress the judges!
Keeping in the vein of “Science for Society”, we aim to make “FearOmone” affordable for the poor farmers of India. We have created a Business Canvas which lays out our Business Model, envisaging how we aim to launch our project given its positive social and environmental benefits. We plan to expand our project into a general “Prey-Predator” Scheme Pest Control System by creating highly specific pest deterrents by mimicking natural predators. To ensure scalability, we have designed a BioReactor which is the shortest route to launch “FearOmone” straight from the lab into the industry. We have been lucky to get abundant support from our crowd funding campaign on “ketto.org”. On pitching our project to investors, we have been receiving support from Hash Brown Systems and Avian Wellness Pvt Ltd. Furthermore, we are being guided by the Technology Business Incubator, IISER Mohali, who have agreed to incubate our startup, provided we are able to show successful animal trials.
. Cost of recyclable/disposable shell vs. producing recombinant yeast (limiting factor in mass production)
. PSU/Bank model – subsidize for farmers, hike base price for commercial enterprises
. Extending the principle to multiple prey predator pairs
. FearOmone v2.0, the Universal Predator
. Startup type, TBI
We are lucky to have gotten support from our crowd funding campaign on ketto.org.We were also lucky enough to be funded by Hash Brown Systems.ltd to whom we had pitched our project.