Team:ABSI Kenya/Entrepreneurship
Innovative ideas to solve local problems using synthetic biology.
Introduction
ABSI_Kenya is a team of young professionals with innovative ideas to solve local problems using synthetic biology.
About our project
Every year, 1.6 million lives are lost globally as a result of diarrheal diseases. A huge percentage of these are linked to poor sanitation and hygiene and contaminated water. In Kenya alone, 47% of the population lacks access to clean drinking water.
This demographic relies on ponds, rivers wells, and other unimproved sources Unfortunately, these are contaminated with industrial effluent and domestic output such as feces. These present a serious health hazard when ingested. These classes of contaminants are dangerous and are known to end human life or at the least cause illness to human beings. Some of the effects are irreversible.
Since this is a major problem in Kenya our team has decided to design a water-based biosensor that will be able to detect chemical and microbial contaminants in water. Our project gives a provision for affected communities to test their drinking water from the comfort of their homes. With the use of biological engineering principles, we have designed a biosensor that detects the common bacterial and chemical contaminants, The kit will be highly accurate and the results will be easy to read, hence no laboratory is required for this.
About Kenya
★ ALERT!
This page is used by the judges to evaluate your team for the medal criterion or award listed below.
Delete this box in order to be evaluated for this medal criterion and/or award. See more information at Instructions for Pages for awards.
Entrepreneurship
Best Supporting Entrepreneurship Special Prize
The Best Supporting Entrepreneurship award recognizes exceptional effort to build a business case and commercialize an iGEM project. This award is open to all teams to show that entrepreneurship is something all teams can aspire to do with their project. This award can go to an new project, or to a previous project that a team aimed to commercialize. Have you filed a provisional patent on your project/device/process? Have you raised money to build and ship products? Have you pitched your idea to investors and received money? As always in iGEM, the aim is to impress the judges!
To compete for the Best Supporting Entrepreneurship prize, please describe your work on this page and also fill out the description on the judging form.
Inspiration
You can look at what other teams did to get some inspiration!
Here are a few examples:
Patents and intellectual property
If your team is seriously considering commercializing and looking into building a company after the competition, you may want to look at how you are going to protect your work and secure investment. Investors will usually require some form of intellectual protection, so you may want to investigate how to apply for a patent or provisional patent in your country and region before disclosing your project at iGEM. Remember that you can only be evaluated in iGEM based on what you share on your wiki and at the Jamboree, so any work you don't present can't count towards your project.
This is an area where we are different as we care about sharing, openness and contributing to the community and investors don't always agree with these values. It is up to you and your team to decide what to do. Remember that most universities have a commercialization department and that you can talk to them before coming to a decision.