What are we trying to do?
The purpose of this team
As iGEM Alumni who have experienced many iGEM competitions, we have been thinking about one question: why so many amazing ideas in iGEM competitions did not become reality in the end? When we want to get our iGEM projects really off the ground, what stops these projects from changing the world when we face the harsh real world? In thinking about this question, many iGEMers may doubt themselves: do we really have the power to change the world? What we want to do, instead, is to be an example to show at least Chinese iGEMers: we really can.
So, for our encoring iGEM competition, we wanted to show iGEMers what we can do by completing a highly industrialized iGEM project, and give a paradigm to iGEMers in the China to lead more iGEMers to continue thinking about how we can make our world a better place after their first iGEM.
Why Foundational Advance Track?
To realize the industrialization of our projects, we think we first need to understand what are the critical points of a project in the industrialization process and what kind of projects can gain advantages in the industry and market. In fact, this is a very complex issue. We have conducted a lot of research on this point, which has allowed us to understand the world we are facing in enough depth. Details will be presented in the entrepreneurship section.
Ultimately, we believe we need a technology platform that changes the current synthetic biology product development process so that our technologies can meet the needs of the current Chinese market environment. This is an innovation in technology capability at the proof-of-concept level of product development, rather than focusing on the industrialization of a specific product. Our current experience has shown that this technology has set us apart from our competitors and has significantly advanced our industrialization process.
What environment is China's synbio entrepreneurs in?
We believe that no matter what we do, we do it in a specific environment. Before we think that synthetic biology is going to change the world, we should first think about whether our environment is ready for it.
Is China ready for synthetic biology?
In recent years, synthetic biology's scientific research results are gradually transforming the industry with the development of underlying technologies such as gene editing and genetic testing, cost reduction, and efficiency improvement. In China, with the support of national policies and encouraged by successful business cases, this field is receiving great attention from investors.
The number of new registrations of synthetic biology-related companies in China reportedly changed little from 2017 to 2019, remaining below 6,000 per year, only to suddenly leap forward after 2020, increasing by 355% to 28,000 in 2020 and reaching 58,000 in 2021, and already reaching 38,000 in the first seven months of 2022.
We believe that China now has a good environment to support the development of synthetic biology in the industry. The environment supports and needs innovative teams like ONCE to drive the industrial revolution.
What industry is ready for synthetic biology?
Synthetic biology has the potential to be applied in a variety of industries. We believe that synthetic biology itself should play its role as a technology. However, not all industries are suitable for immediate application of synthetic biology due to technology, acceptance, policies and so on. So, what are the most suitable fields for synthetic biology at present?
Based on our market research on the potential market for synthetic biology, (Details can be seen on our Entrepreneurship page), we noticed a potetial CAGR growth of around 60% in cosmetic and food market due to the consumer industry's own pursuit of low cost and ESG.
Add to the technical capabilities of our team, we believe that the cosmetic and food industries are the best choices for us at the moment.
Market: Direct environment of entrepreneurs
For entrepreneurs, we are most directly confronted with the selection of market environment. A company's ability to adapt to the market is also what investors look for most, as it represents the longevity of the company and its ability to generate profits. In our forecast of the future of the synthetic biology industry, we believe that now is the best time to enter the cosmetic and food sectors. Therefore, we would like to explore how synthetic biology should cut into the industry chain in these two to-consumer markets.
Based on our market research in the cosmetic and food sectors, we have found that they are areas where product demand is changing very rapidly. Iteration of beauty efficacy molecules as well as food flavors is a core competitive tool for companies in the current consumer market. This means that we need to iterate quickly in order to meet the rapidly changing needs of our products.
Therefore, for our chosen industry, our core competency is rapid product iteration.
Our goals and achievements
A time-saving platform for synbio product development
For the current market environment in China, we will focus here only on the R&D processd in biomanufacturing. Generally speaking, this process can be divided into product selection, proof of concept and scale-up. In this process, proof of concept is the first limiting step to commercial success because it helps us quickly identify whether we can develop a product so that we can sift through the large number of selections at the technical level.
Therefore, we decided to build a time-saving platform for proof of concept in synbio product development.
Dfficulties and our solutions
Cross-species Characterization of Metabolic Pathway
We need to acknowledge that each specific product in biomanufacturing has a chassis that is best suited for its production. It is unlikely that perfect production of all substances can be achieved through a single chassis.
Therefore, we need a technology to rapidly carry out proof-of-concept in different chassis strains. While existing methods can usually only be tested in a very few chassis organisms, we developed a Golden Gate Collection to enable rapid validation across species.
Construction of platform molecule producing chassis
Farnesyl pyrophosphate(FPP) is the precursor of terpenes. Terpenes have a wide range of applications in many fields, especially in our targeted cosmetic and food industries. To advance our our development efficiency and product yield, we need to first obtain high-FPP-yield chassis.
There are three pathways that are used in the generic construct strategy: MEP, MVA and UIP. Using the corresponding genome editing strategy, we successfully constructed high-FPP-yield E.coli and Vibrio natriegens strain. To apply efficient genome editing of V.nat, we also developed a CRISPR-based gene manipulating toolkit for V.nat.
Water resource demand and sustainability
Conventional industrial fermentation requires large amounts of water. This water is usually fresh water and needs to be sterilized before it can be used for fermentation. In our project, we chose a non-model organism, V.nat, as our primary chassis. This organism can ferment in high salinity waters and naturally carries selective genes that allows it to ferment in a non-sterile environment. Using V.nat, we can save significant freshwater resources while reducing the carbon footprint required for sterilization. This non-sterilized seawater fermentation condition has been demonstrated in our laboratory.
First step to change the world: (-)-α-bisabolol
Success in one product is the strongest evidence of the capability of our platform. After careful market consideration, we decided to choose (-)-α-bisabolol as our first product. With this product, we validated all our key technologies and received subsequent financial support. We have now achieved ten times the yield of our (-)-α-bisabolol product in V.nat compared to conventional E.colichassis. Further testing of product performance will be conducted once our startup completes the administrative process.