Overview
Customer Problem
The cloning process consists of several individual steps, each with its own equipment and machinery. It is complex, yet still requires a remarkable amount of human intervention. This results in errors, inconsistencies, and an overall delay in meeting significant synthetic biology milestones. Our team seeks to minimize this “human intervention” element by designing, prototyping, and commercializing an automated cloning system.
Our Solution
Our flagship product, ModuLab, is an automated system designed to optimize cloning, the underlying process of synthetic biology. The ultimate goals of ModuLab are to minimize error, maximize efficiency and provide synthetic biologists with feedback on every stage of the cloning process.
Competitive Analysis
Direct Competition
Because of the relative youth of synthetic biology, there are currently no products that are able to fully conduct the cloning protocol from start to finish without human intervention. We could, however, experience competition from device manufacturers that produce some of the individual components of our system. As per our own research, the closest product to ModuLab is the Freedom EVO® Expression Workstation produced by Tecan Group Ltd.
Indirect Competition
Indirect competition to the field of synthetic biology as a whole is high, given other technologies that have been around for decades. In the specific niche market within which Vivosynth is positioned, however, such competition is negligible, because of the relative nonexistence of methods to fully automate the cloning protocol.
Future Competition
Future competition will likely come in the form of new advances in robotics and automation that will further optimize cloning. Vivosynth is uniquely suited to adapting to these new advances because of our close ties to the University of Illinois and our ability to modify our product(s) as and when it needs to be.
Competitive Advantage
Our product, ModuLab, would be unique in its ability to conduct the entire cloning protocol from start to finish without human intervention. As far as we know, there are no products capable of doing this. We believe such a product would dramatically increase the rate at which synthetic biology research and manufacturing progresses over the next decade. The product is also unique because it will be able to adapt to automate any lab machinery.
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