The most essential problem for probiotic products is how to guarantee activity and amount in the gut. Milk tea powder is our choice for the product form.
    In industrialization, engineered bacteria should be at first cultured at 37℃, at this point oscillators in all cells start to work; then we use a high concentration of lactose to induce them into synchronization, at which oscillators stop in the same stage and proteins accumulate in a stable level. Freezing-drying management makes bacteria powder easy to preserve and transport.
    In the customer terminal, using warm water whose temperature is between the killing temperature threshold and temperature that cells can’t bear to activate engineered bacteria into synchronized work is highly recommended. This operation transforms the powder into a solution, which is mild and protective for the alimentary canal.
    What is worth mentioning is that we extra mix our milk tea powder with some methionine. Moderate methionine not only can be health care which is good for humans but is also a raw material for the SAMe production. What is more, we plan to surround B. longum with polymer γ-PGA to prevent them from damage through freezing-drying. The protective barrier reduces the hurt towards bacteria and enhances the survival rate after reliving.

    Giving the credit to polymer barrier and freezing-drying operation, our product better sustains abundant bacteria to colonize the intestinal. Existing probiotic products are prepared as drinks, powder, or yogurt, whose management is just mingling bacteria with carrier or medium, without operation to maintain the activity of bacteria or ensure that alimentary liquid will not degrade cell bodies or effective constituents. Under comparison, freezing-drying makes the highest work efficiency and appropriate starting time sustained and the polymer barrier covering cells guarantees rapid hypothermia can’t go so far as to damage probiotics while lowering the rate of decomposition when our probiotic drink flows in the alimentary canal. In summary, these protective methods effectively increase the colonized amount in the intestinal.

    The characteristic of our project is to use SAMe as an effective substance to be secreted. SAMe, s-adenosylmethionine, a natural metabolism product in cells, is reported to have a similar antidepressant function as prescription drugs, while SAMe acts milder and does not cause our nerve’s resistance or dependence on drug abuse. As a natural product in cells, the reaction to synthesize SAMe is easy and raw materials are primarily preserved, which is simple for us to utilize. What we have conducted is improving production efficiency by replacing synthesized enzymes with a more effective one.

    Bifidobacterium longum has been reported to have great potential in alleviating the symptoms of various mental disorders through the microbiota–gut–brain axis (MGBA). With functions of secreting inflammation factors, regulating the intestinal ecosystem, and synthesizing useful molecules, intestinal probiotics are helpful for depression treatment. By exerting antidepressant probiotic-B. longum and molecule-SAMe, the potential and prospects of our innovations about anti-depression has been explored as much as possible.
    What is more, set of the oscillator can deeply enlarge and highlight the advantages of our product. Sustainable production and secretion may accumulate molecules in the blood, causing side effects. However, the oscillator ensures periodical work cycle, simulating manually intaking drugs in a fixed time. On the one hand, periodical secretion maintains appropriate blood drug concentration, and on the other hand, clock-like work decreases the possibility of bringing bad symptoms.

    Our product and ideas follow the patient-friendly principle. Knowing that depression patients’ suffer from cold forms of drugs such as capsules, pills, tablets, and high-frequency taking, we hope our product can be a relief for them. So, milk tea powder is what we choose, which can be easily accepted. It can relieve the burden when taking probiotics in front of the public. Taste and nutrients are also we have considered, that’s why we add extra methionine and other additives to regulate flavor and nutrition-allocated proportion. Despite these, the long-term work of oscillators makes low-frequency intaking possible. Combining probiotics and natural antidepressants expands the efficacy.

    "Venlafaxine", a common antidepressant, initially 25 mg/time, two to three times/day, then gradually increased to 75 to 225 mg/day, two to three times. If a sustained-release capsule is used, it should be taken once a day at a fixed time with food at a daily dose. Patients should increase the dose at intervals of not less than 4 days with each increase of 75 mg/day. Compared to this, in our product, intestinal bacteria are responsible for producing drugs for a long time, and the oscillators in the bacteria regulate drug secretion rhythmically and periodically. This greatly reduces the frequency of the medication, which can be taken in a single dose for a long time, and the probiotics can also work in the gut for the time prescribed by the patients.

    Taking tricyclic antidepressants can cause adverse reactions such as dry mouth, tachycardia, dysuria and blurred vision, orthostatic hypotension, and lethargy. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors, when combined with foods such as chicken liver, yeast and alcohol, pose a risk of hypertension. Problems such as rash and mania are occasionally seen in individual patients with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. After taking 5-HT and NE reuptake inhibitors, patients will have increased appetite and weight gain, and some patients will show nausea, night sweats, sleepiness, and dizziness. Our drug, SAMe, by contrast, is naturally present in cells. It is used as an antidepressant supplement, on the one hand, it can relieve symptoms, on the other hand, it does not bring about major side effects. At the same time, we use oscillators to keep the drug in the blood at a concentration that is effective but not too high to cause side effects.

    We are now using the laboratory provided by the school of life sciences of Wuhan University for independent research. The project is independently researched and developed by the team. In terms of R & D, first, we are seeking cooperation with companies or institutions engaged in depression treatment or synthetic biology research. Second, we are trying to apply the latest research results in relevant fields for research, to expand the application of our product technology, further improve the quality of products and enrich the functions of products. Third, we are going to transfer our design into the genome of the probiotic to satisfy the requirement of commercial production.

    At the initial stage of development, our products will be produced by OEM companies with production qualifications around Wuhan. Through large-scale production with appropriate manufacturers, we can reduce production costs, improve production efficiency, enhance our market competitiveness, and enable our business team to focus on product R & D. In the middle and later stages of the project, we plan to invest in our own factory to produce products.

    Our sales adopt the combination of direct sales and commission sales. The sales plan in the foreign market is realized through distributors. The sales team in domestic sales team is set up to be responsible for product promotion, directly facing hospitals, depressive communities, biological products enterprises, universities, and biological products research institutes.
    What we focus mostly on are depressive communities, which we believe to be the most effective way to promote our product through communication with some depressive communities like Do & Go. And our questionnaire also indicates that patients prefer to get in touch with new antidepressant drugs through their friends or other patients. Because of the limited side effects of our product and the low frequency of drugs taken, the patients will get a more comfortable experience, and they shall prefer to recommend our products. Through our integrated human practice, we are going to build a selling network in depressive communities and establish our reputation in these communities.

    For online sales, we will adopt a B2B business model and establish official sales centers on multiple e-commerce platforms.
    Moreover, the company plans to establish an official website, build a vertical B2B platform, concentrate all efforts to build a professional information platform, efficiently connect hospitals, biological products enterprises, universities, and biological products research institutes, and develop more in-depth and unique service contents and profit models in continuous exploration.

At this stage, we divide our target customers into two groups:
    1. Patients have suffered very long from depression
     These patients have very long experience with drugs taken, which means they care more about the side effects and frequency of drug taking. So, we believe they will be attracted to our product more. What’s more, they are relatively more active in depressive communities, which will influence the popularization of our product.
     2. Patients with mild depression
     These patients may have got in touch with depression for not very long, and they may have defensiveness against those traditional antidepressant drugs, which gives chances for our product to gain their preference. The advantages of our product we discussed above and the easily acceptable form of it all make our product a priority to customers with mild depression.

    In the early stage of the company's development, we will focus on the core business, accumulate early capital through technical services, patent transfer, and other ways, and actively cooperate with drug companies and research institutions. For this part of business, considering the traditional antidepressant drug market and the positioning of our innovative product engineering bacteria, we decided to adopt a skimming pricing strategy. With the expansion of business scale and the increase of sales volume, the company will maximize profits at any time by appropriately adjusting prices and affecting sales changes.

    According to the market characteristics of probiotics therapy, we have formulated a channel strategy combining point-to-point sales in the early stage and agent distribution in the later stage to meet the needs of improving market coverage, channel flexibility, and channel control.

1. Channel Selection

2. Channel expanding

3. Channel control