Approaching Our Project From Another Perspective

During the development of our technology it became clear that a variety of hurdles would have to be overcome for our product to reach market. These included areas surrounding safety of our technology to the public, perception of our technology by key decision makers and end-users, and the protection of the platform from competitors who would be interested in expanding into our market space.

A Composite Approach To "Human Practices" From a Company

What is Human Practices? More importantly, what relevance does it have to the formation of a company? How can we develop our ideas in an ethical, safe, and environmentally conscious ways to better the world? Our human practice initiatives aimed at providing answers to these questions within the context of our companies target market: the oil and gas industry.

To achieve these aims we worked closely with our end-users and networked extensively with groups to gain importance insight into the development of our product. We worked to analyze and predict the appropriate safety and containment solutions that would be required to not only provide a safe environment to our end-users, but also to prevent our end-user or other competitors from developing our ideas. Finally, we aimed to share our experiences and learning with new iGEM groups.

Networking Events

We attended a variety of events over the last year to create contacts within the business and synthetic biology communities. Through this we have met individuals involved in a vast number of different industries with a wide array of backgrounds. These meetings are summarized in the table below.

Through these events we have met many contacts. At the ETEB, AITF, OSLI, and BioAlberta events we met numerous industry contacts that have been essential in spreading the word about our small startup. We also met professionals in law, business structure, marketing, and intellectual property through the SynBioBeta and Banff Venture Forum that have been essential in getting us to the stage we are at now. Presenting our technology at the SB 6.0 conference was an amazing opportunity for our group to gain some validation of our ideas, and the positive feedback we received there was invaluable.

Biological Safety and Containment

While our technology does have a living organism at it's heart, we have constantly put safety and containment as one of our top priorities. Through our work we have developed an organism that cannot survive outside of our engineered system, but if it somehow did manage to escape, we have built in fail safe mechanisms to force the organism to commit suicide. As well as these measures, our system is designed such that there is only an applicator to the system, making the organism inside inaccessible to the user, isolating our organism and protecting our intellectual property at the same time.

To ensure that our organism performs the sensing task and nothing else we have engineered a bleach system into our final designs. This accomplishes two tasks in our product. Primarily, it ensures that the bacteria used in the testing does not live past it's usefulness, but it also accomplishes a secondary goal of making our product disposable in everyday waste by removing any potential biohazard. This decreases the costs associated with disposal of our product, ensuring safety and lowering costs.

Outreach and Community Development

Our team has aided in developing a synthetic biology community here in Alberta. We hope that by encouraging future synthetic biologists we can sow the seeds for a thriving biotechnology business in Canada.