As with every iGEM team, we believe that our idea has the potential for an after-Jamboree project. But the transition from the iGEM competition to the start-up company might be difficult. For this reason, during and after engaging with different stakeholders to improve our project, we came to the idea to gather more information about the potential prospects of the iGEM afterglow.

In this regard, we interviewed companies investing in start-ups, fully developed companies and an iGEM start-up. From the information we collected during these interviews we created an entrepreneurial guide: “What is next? The future beyond iGEM” to support current and prospective iGEM teams in their future business plans. We wrote this guide to help us, and you, understand how an iGEM project can evolve into a potential start-up. We used the iGEM start-up Scope Biosciences as a case study to support the tips and tricks in this guide.

Scope Biosciences is an outstanding example of iGEM, since this company was developed from the WUR iGEM team 2017 named Mantis. The company was founded in 2020 by Jurre Steens, Niek Savelkoul, Bart Scholten and Stijn Prinsen as a spin-off of Wageningen University and Research. Scope Biosciences’ focus is the development of molecular diagnostics with CRISPR-Cas technology. We talked with Niek Savelkoul, CEO of Scope Bioscience s, to understand how iGEM helped them to continue with their project as a start-up and to ask him for tips and advice.