Madrid-OLM

Entrepreneurship

When technology meets social needs

The sense of initiative and entrepreneurship should take into account a number of complementary factors. The essence of profitability has many sides, as a dice.

We would love to run fast enough to chase this sort of elegance!

We believe there is an iGEM mindset: any prospective benefits should take into account social improvement, sustainable development goals, and finally, progressive scalability oriented to contribute to humanity as a whole.

We would love to contribute to spreading these ideas as a competitive player in the market. That is why we are founding a startup based on what we have learned last year at iGEM.

Enabling an entrepreneurial network

Within the iGEM competition, we have been generating the business network that we will need to found a challenging and ambitious startup. Our roadmap is categorized into three main sections.

Talking to the future investors: HAX programme

We have introduced our project to the leading Hardware accelerator in the world: HAX.

HAX is the Hardware branch of the global hedge fund SOSV and it is located in the Silicon Valley of the Hardware, Shenzhen (China). The HAX programme is divided into two stages:

The first one where you obtain 100.000$ and a place to work within 6 months in Shenzhen to develop the most suitable manufacturing network for the product.
The second one is based on San Francisco and covers the development of the commercial structure for the startup.

We had applied to HAX and we have been successfully selected for the first stage with the condition that all the biotech subsystems should be developed.

Throughout the iGEM competition, we had proved that our device measures correctly the target protein. Therefore, we had recovered the conversation with HAX.

Once we are back from Boston we will prepare our travel to Shenzhen.

Making commercial agreements with Spanish biotech startups

Although we have developed a discovery system for new aptamers, we have established a commercial agreement with an Spanish leader on the field, to integrate five of their working aptamers in our initial device.

This agreement enables us to start implementing our system. Now we can escalate our device to five additional molecules, adding them to our initial protein: OLE1 (the most common allergen in olive pollen).

Customer development

Within our Integrated Human Practices, we have stepped out of the lab and gathered the opinion of the users on the system. In this way, we have followed a typical Customer Development process of the Lean Startup methodology, a standard way of testing customers.

Following this direction, we have coordinated three actions:

First we have diagnosed the pollen allergy to 14 persons, with a standard Prick test. Our 14 first potential members of our community!
Then we showed them the platform that we have developed, gathering their opinions about the ease of use of our app interface.
Finally, we have made some analysis and statistics about the profile of the users that have shown interest in our platform. With this analysis, the objective is to understand better our target archetype.

Overall, coming across iGEM has been great. We have developed a product focused on a high social impact and development. We are founding a startup based on what we have learned.