The place that supported us the most. Being supervised by our Dean/ Prof.
Ahmed Abdo Elsherif and the General Coordinator Prof. Faten Noureldein helped
us get our funds from our University and our faculty. Not only the managers
supported us, but we also found support from the workers in our lab and our doctors,
who helped us with available reagents and any needed knowledge and information.
Fundraising is the biggest problem not only in our country but in all of Africa. Working in such a medical field is a big challenge. We aim to implement synthetic biology in our region by enrolling in iGEM competition, which marks the first step for industrial biotechnology and taking the green light to establish our startup related to synthetic biology. We decided to learn more about negotiation, marketing, and presentation skills to help us to get funded and, after the competition, deal with the market. We aim to turn the investment in scientific projects into synthetic biology by encouraging investors about successful business projects and how they solve the world’s problems. We started to learn how to make scientific and business proposals to communicate with different organizations.
We initiated the fundraising process in April so that we could contact a variety of corporate and scientific organizations.
There were multiple visits to the smart village (the business hub that supports growth and sustainability in all industries
of corporate Egypt) in an attempt to engage with CEOs for a sponsorship proposition. We have demonstrated to them the benefits;
they agreed to the settlement, and it would be a win-win situation. A collaboration to supply us with funds to continue our work;
in exchange, they will receive international recognition for assisting a young team to continue their scientific journey.
Other team members also visited banks, Egypt post, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, the Academy of scientific research
& technology, and the ministry of youth and sports.
All of these marketing and fundraising campaigns contributed to the spread
of the idea behind iGEM and synthetic biology. Our efforts to promote awareness about iGEM and what we can accomplish beyond the
competition significantly impacted our region. During one of our visits to bright skies company, they were intrigued by what we
were doing, especially after we demonstrated our future plans to create a smartwatch. They were eager to assist us, but the medical
sector was outside their expertise, so they could not do so.
We Followed iGEM recommendations in fundraising as we made many presentations to our faculty to win the support from our professors. They believed in us and helped us in many different ways.
We then made different trials to gain more support from other foundations. Unfortunately, we only gained it from 3 national organizations (Misr El Kheir Foundation - Egyptair - Delta ) besides our University.
- Faculty of Science
- Misr-El Kheir Foundation
- EgyptAir
- Delta
- Geneious
- Mathwork
- Promega
A non-profit organization called Misr El Kheir Foundation (MEK) was founded in 2007 to comprehensively develop the Egyptian individual.
Health, Education, Scientific Research, Social Solidarity, Aspects of Life, Civil Associations Development, and Integrated
Developments are the seven key pillars of human development that have been chosen. They provided us with part of the team members’
plane tickets.
Egypt's well-known national carrier, EGYPTAIR, is headquartered in the international metropolis of Cairo.
They provided us with a discount on our plane tickets.
A trading company, that works on supplying kits and reagents in biotechnology.
They helped us with some reagents to use in wet lab work.
They gave our team members a free license to use geneious software. Their sponsorship allowed each team member to use the software for free till the ending date of the competition.
They gave our team members a free license to use Mathworks software. Same as Geneious,
they sponsored us by allowing each team member to use the software for free till the ending date of the competition.
We were honored to win their grant to fund iGEM teams with 2500 US Dollars for kits and reagents from them.
After these different obstacles, we wanted to share our experience and spread it among students from different universities, so we held two events gathering many students.
A great event hosted at Nile University that discussed biotechnology
and how to build your career in it. We had a session titled “Our road
to international competitions” to instruct junior students to enroll
in iGEM Competitions and how to make their startups based on synthetic Biology.
Our team held a day of miniGEM workshops focused on funding your project.
Moreover, we provided them with knowledge about Human practices, Wiki, and iGEM cycle.
