Best Supporting Entrepreneurship
Project Ceres is a biopesticide made through engineering of the soil-borne bacteria Bacillus subtilis to produce and secrete a cytotoxin to manage fungus gnats and other Dipteran insects in greenhouses. It has a biological switch to allow growers to turn our biopesticide on and off at will. Our aim is that this product will decrease the major losses sustained by greenhouses due to insect pests and the diseases they often vector.
Business Plan
To finance our research this year, iGEM Guelph pitched our proposal to 6 of our internal colleges. Through our efforts, we raised $22,000 and thank those colleges for their support! We also pitched our idea to the J.F. Wood Centre for Business and Student Entreprise on campus and refined our business plan with their help. Please see our attached business plan below.
Customer Segments
Our target buyers are local, large-scale greenhouses, however we would intend to eventually expand nationally and throughout North America, if not globally. Greenhouse associations are key to us reaching a larger audience, since growers rely on these associations as a trusted source for new products and information. Our biopesticide is useful for fungus gnats in tomatoes or other plants, such as poinsettias. It is also valuable for growers with root zone diseases, such as flower or cannabis growers.
Value Proposition
Our biopesticide is great for growers who experience pesticide resistance and want to keep their biologicals (living organisms growers use for pest control) safe as our bioinsecticide is highly target specific, and can be made endemic to a greenhouse while being activated only as a spot treatment.
Channels
Through our Human Practices work, we learned that growers prefer to be contacted by email, however we will also reach out to growers in person as most businesses prefer meeting their business partners. We also found greenhouse associations to be an excellent channel for reaching growers, as they will already have an established and trusted relationship.
Customer Relationships
We want to provide a trust-worthy service through offering an easy-to-use biopesticide that is highly effective and efficient. We want to create a biopesticide that is used by growers across Canada and eventually globally. We’ve learned that growers and consumers are more likely to adopt a genetically engineered product if the producers communicate openly about the nature of their product.
Revenue Streams
We will further explore this avenue when we are closer to finishing product development, however through meeting with an Intellectual Property specialist we learned that we will make no profits during the first few years of startup. Once our product is fully patented, we can license our patent out to other companies or commercialize our project. There is also the option to sell our patent and project outright to a research or pesticide company. This second option is the path that has been more strongly recommended to us by industry experts, since pesticide companies will be very familiar with the process of getting a product like ours to market, and will be able to do so more efficiently than other interested parties.
Key Partners
Our key partners can be summed up into two groups: current and future partners. We’d like to thank the University of Guelph for providing us with lab space and funding to develop our project, our Dr. Seah and Dr. Shapiro for guiding us in our endeavors as our Primary and Secondary Investigators, and the iGEM association for providing us with the platform to share our scientific research. We’d like to also thank the patent office at the University of Guelph for providing us with advice about patents and intellectual property.
Key Activities
Throughout our project, we have done various Human Practices work in areas from Market Analysis (see below) to Stakeholder Analysis (refer to our Human Practices page for more information). Going forwards we will analyze and perform research to bridge the gap between our current project and commercialization. We will address the limitations (see below) that we have discovered and work on the tests that we need to complete to further refine our project.
Key Resources
We need to further finance and ensure lab space for our team’s research and development. We do not have the finances to fund our project until its completion, so collaborating with a pesticide company will enable our team to ensure Project Ceres’ commercialization. We will also need to maintain communication with our stakeholders (see the Human Practices and Integrated Human Practices page), and find greenhouse research spaces that can test our project and use said experiments to further refine our project.
Cost Structure
We have not investigated cost structure in much detail as we are not at the juncture for commercialization, we still have to apply for pesticide registration. However, we are aware that when determining our cost structure we will need to factor in key expenses, including the pesticide registration fee, the patent fee, lab and operating costs for our team, and production costs for our biopesticide product, for which we will need to find a supplier that will make a mutually beneficial business agreement with us.
Steps to Commercialization
Market Analysis
For our project to excel in the national market, it had to be unique and solve a problem that other pesticides did not, or that they could not solve as effectively. We explored this through investigating current products on the market, and speaking with growers and greenhouse associations. While it was important to look at competing products, it was essential for us to understand grower’s problems by speaking to them directly. From the surveys we sent out to growers and the communication we had with growing associations, we learned that while fungus gnats are a problem, other insects such as spider mites, thrips, aphids and white flies pose a major threat to growers. With our bioinsecticide being very target specific, it may be suitable for pest management of these insects in greenhouses granted that we alter our cytotoxin of choice to be effective against these pests. In discussion with our wet lab team, we have determined that this is a feasible change to make in future iterations of our work.
Human Practices Work
Throughout our project, we have reached out to and met with various stakeholders to bring our biopesticide from a tangible idea made in the lab to the global market. Key stakeholders we communicated with were greenhouse growers, greenhouse associations, entomologists, and intellectual property and patent experts. For more information, please refer to our Human Practices page. Overall, we learned that our project is of great interest to stakeholders, but would be more valuable to growers if it targeted aphids, mites, white flies or thrips, rather than vectors that spread fungal disease like fungus gnats, and that many more tests and experiments needed to be done to refine our project further for commercialization.
Barriers
From our Human Practices work, we learned that the path to commercialization is not a straight road, but a path with many twists and turns. As a student run team, we do not compare to a large scale pesticide company and work with a limited budget, so we are unable to finance our project from start to finish. We do however, have several options for partnerships we could pursue. For patenting, we could allow the University of Guelph’s Patent office to pursue a patent on our behalf, should they wish to. This would allow us to pursue a patent without financing the $30,000 or more that is required, as the University of Guelph would finance those costs. Whatever money they make from the patent would be split between us and them. This way we would be able to protect our idea, but also not cause a major deficit in our team’s finances. We could also collaborate with a small pesticide or research company that has enough funding for us to finance the refinement and commercialization of our biopesticide to pass the pesticide registration process laid out by the PMRA. Applying for a patent and the pesticide registration process are two of our biggest hurdles, as both cost lots of money and require a lot of time. However, we believe that growers and grower associations are interested in our project so we would like to pursue commercialization for the benefit of growers, Canadians, and the environment.
Limitations and Future Research
Due to the time restraints of this competition, it is not feasible to conduct all the experiments and studies necessary to bring a GMO pesticide to market. We hope that in the near future, we will be able to conduct more research and experiments to build on this year’s project. Some tests and experiments would include: mutation frequency, creation of a novel kill switch, and quorum sensing.
Mutation Frequency
As our biopesticide is a GMO, we will need to experiment about the regeneration of the bacteria making up our product. Bacterial populations grow and develop quickly, and as such, we need to ensure that our product will not undergo any detrimental or dangerous mutations. For this, we will investigate the concept of selective pressures, variables that affect the survival of an organism, and whether we can mimic this through creating certain environmental pressures that will prevent the mutation of our bacteria. This research will likely lead to changes in our genetic modifications, as well as additional usage instructions for growers to follow on an eventual product label.
Novel Kill Switches
From our Human Practices interviews, we learned that a kill switch for our biopesticide would be beneficial for many growers. A kill switch would enable growers to safely dispose of our biopesticide without concerns about the effects of a GMO in the environment or on produce. A possible kill switch for our bacteria could be the use of an engineered toxin and antitoxin, where when the antitoxin is not being provided by the grower, the toxin produced by the bacteria will kill the cell, enabling safe disposal of the bacteria. In this scenario, a toxin/antitoxin system could be as simple as removing the ability of our bacteria to produce an essential compound for itself, so that this compound must be provided by the grower. When the grower stops providing the compound, the bacteria will die. This has seemed to work for other teams, and if we produce a unique and highly specific kill switch we may be able to patent it as a novel idea.
Quorum Sensing
To bridge the final gap between our project being a tangible idea, to an approved biopesticide on the market, we would need to investigate and experiment in the field of quorum sensing. Quorum sensing is invaluable for the survival of our bacteria in hydroponic growing systems, which is the growing method that most Canadian tomato greenhouses use. Hydroponics uses a water-based system with a non-soil substrate and as such, we will need to ensure that our bacteria survives in the water and is able to be recycled by growers. Growers recycle their nutrients and other essential factors in their water, and as such, our bacteria would need to be effective regardless of how many times it passes through hydroponic pipes and the associated cleaning tank. This is where quorum sensing comes in. Quorum sensing is how bacteria communicates with itself and we could use this to determine how much of our bacteria survives in hydroponic systems. We will investigate what additives and factors we can add to control our organism in a hydroponic system, to ensure its survival and regeneration. This would include food, temperature, and other factors that optimize our bacteria’s growth.
Future Development
Once we have done further lab tests, we would like to test our project in an agricultural greenhouse or greenhouse-simulated environment. We also would like to conduct tests that determine the efficiency of our biopesticide in growing mediums that growers most commonly use. We hope that through “real-life” experimentation we can further refine our project to be the best biopesticide that we can offer to growers.