Team:UNILausanne/EntrepreneurshipOverview
Entrepreneurship Overview
Problem Description
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer worldwide, affecting over 1 million people every year. The current therapies, surgery and chemotherapy, involve substantial risk for complications and negative side effects. We want to develop a targeted therapy with high safety and specificity to help with this problem.
Our Solution
Our treatment consists of a probiotic bacteria (E. coli Nissle 1917) inside an oral pill. Our bacteria containing our repressilator will colonize the area inside of the cancerous tissue in the colon and release azurin (a natural occurring peptide) directly into the tumor. Azurin will be released in an oscillatory manner every 24 h without the need of external stimuli.
Stakeholders Analysis
In this part, we want to determine the people or a group of people who will be affected or involved in our project. The purpose of doing this type of analysis is to know which key players we would need to approach to help in the early stages of our product. We are interested in approaching oncologists, patients and especially private biotechnology companies to peak their interest in our product to obtain investment while promising in return a new type of treatment for their patients or a return in profit.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, and in this part, we are looking at how we could protect it as well as explaining all the legal jargon necessary when developing a product. We dealt with developing a patent to protect our design and with obtaining a trademark for our logos. We would trademark the logo you see in figure 1, as well as develop a patent. We also have looked at similar patents to our product that could cause legal problems, and found that as of now there are no products similar to ours.
Market Analysis
We did a market segmentation where we divided potential customers into segments or groups with similar interests, and analyzed what each segment expected from our product. We also determined who our potential competitors would be: from other companies developing similar technology to ours (bacterial therapy) to drugs that are commonly used to treat CRC (Adrucil, Leucovorin, etc…). We also did a market need research to determine where our product could fit in an already competitive market. In actuality, with more than million cases of CRC every year, our product could help alleviate the demand. We finally did a SWOT analysis (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threats), where we determined that what set us apart from our competitors was our innovative approach to CRC treatment while keeping a low cost of production, while one of weaknesses was that our production of azurin could quickly become unstable for example.
Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is a long-term plan that aims to give a business a competitive and strategic advantage. We scrutinized what the target key messages would be, and decided on offering oncologists an efficient treatment for patients and for investors we want to produce a safe and efficient product that will allow a return on investment. The marketing tactic we chose is a B2B strategy that targets experts and companies instead of patients (end users). We started planning how the timeline to put our product out on the market would look like, and estimated it would take at least between 8 and 11 years, as we need to spend time for testing, clinical trials and regulatory approval.
Expert Advice
To create this analysis, we got some feedback from experts in the biotechnology industry, entrepreneurs and IP legal experts.
For more detailed information, please read the following page: Entrepreneurship
