We hosted a meetup with a Beijing team, ATCG whose project aims to modify the CRISPR technology - Casposons to solve the off-target problem.
Figure 1. Virtual meeting with the ATCG team
In the progression, not only have we gradually unfolded each other’s concerns but also thought deeply into the possible methods that we can raise to solve one another’s bewilderments. Therefore, under the background circumstances of this cooperative atmosphere, we opened our minds to studying the ATCG group’s ideas. Since the online collaboration took place after we had been stuck with the business plan, our team also asked for the ATCG group’s advice about the writing of financial predicting analysis and their proposed promotion channel.
Among all the inspirational points we mentioned during the meeting, the discussion on “Patent application” has provided the most helpful thinking alternatives to our team. As their expression regarding their experimental outcome as purely an intellectual property contrasted hugely with our aim of developing the outcome into a customer-end product, we reflected on our mindset and discovered that our experimental outcome would also be some kind of biomedical intellectual property. Therefore, we chose to adopt ATCG’s step of patenting the experimental achievement with our own one and shift our product form more towards business-end ones. After the learning, we fully used the next hour to brainstorm the adjusting method as we were planning to refine our product. In the end, it was indeed the sharing that pushed our mindset to open up and rethink the possibility of commoditizing the product in a food additive way that would less interfere with medical regulations and policies. This has made the collaboration especially meaningful.
Besides the fabulous points, a more inspiring discovery and the proposed idea would be the potential of a future collaboration between our experimental group and ATCG’s experimental group. Because of the possible cooperation between the DNA engineering Crisper-Cas technology and our drug screening platform. It is discussed and research- proved that the two core techs in our project can be combined in order to boost the drug screening platform’s efficiency. Therefore, although the interconnection between the two core concepts is hard to implement at once, we aim to dig deeper into the collaboration in the near future.
We had a takeout-lunch seminar with the Caries Flor team whose project goal was to solve the problem of dental cavities through gene editing technology.
Figure 2. Photos of our happy takeout-lunch seminar
We have provided some opinions on Business Plan and made some research data related to medicine. And their team also let us know more about the way to show the results. In addition, we shared the idea and progress with each other regarding the fundraising activity, promoted each other's products, and at the same time promoted the selling tips of our originally designed peripheral products.
The collaboration served mainly as a sharing of experience from our side as a more experienced team to their side. As our team started earlier than their team to focus on the project, we dived into the writing and brainstorming of the business plan earlier. Therefore, after our three trials attempting to optimize our proposed prospect for the scientific breakthrough, we concluded and told them that the incessant communication between the experiment team and business team is essential for a real product to be made. Although in the discussion, the Caries Flor team disagreed with our alarm about the pursuit of realistic applicability and encouraged us to think wider for the future of the product, they committed that they indeed learned a lot regarding the structure and the logic flow in our business plan. In response, we were also encouraged by their calling for doing bigger things, our team reconsidered the possibility of making drugs while at that moment we were prone to do dietary supplements.
After that lunch, relatively reliable instructions on writing a business plan have been delivered to the Caries Flor team while our team is empowered and thus determined to the plan to return to the topic of making new drugs rather than dietary supplements.
