Collaboration
Shanghai_city & The_Webb_Schools
We collaborated through an online meeting with the Lighthouse team, another iGEM team in 2021 that had some experience and results. We attach great importance to this opportunity for collaboration, as both of our teams are working on topics related to depression. First of all, we introduced our research topics to each other. We found a lot in common with each other from the inspiration of the project. For example, both of our teams believe that the current treatment methods for depression are insufficient and the results are not satisfactory. Therefore, we both hope to find a new way to provide more treatment options for patients with depression. After a short period of communication, we learned that their team is developing an active enzyme to reduce the side effects of oxidative stress response to alleviate the symptoms of depression, filling a gap in the treatment of patients with moderate to mild depression. From the target audience's perspective, our two segments include treatment for prevention, mild, moderate, and major depression. Comprehensive coverage is a great advantage for our product sales. However, the difficulty is how to give consideration to the research experiments of two parts simultaneously and how to balance the sales weight of two products. In terms of the market, our two teams still have a competitor relationship. In the two new products of the same type, we need to think about how to make users firmly choose our products. In addition, we also talked about the publicity and sales of peripheral products. As for the sales of peripheral products, our two teams agree that our main purpose is to publicize our research and ideas, let more people see what we are doing, and the secondary purpose is to earn funds (a small amount of funds is not enough to support the research and development of our products). In the beginning, we discussed a lot of new and exciting peripheral products internally. But they do not seem to fit the public buying psychology. So we asked Lighthouse for our experience in selling peripheral products. Through communication, they customized many different peripheral products in a small number of ways and then successfully promoted their peripheral products using publicity and product packaging. This method is also something we can learn from. Secondly, their peripheral products choose practical canvas bags, umbrellas, and so on. The core value of these products lies more in their use. In this way, not only people who want to support our research will buy our products, but a group of people who need such daily necessities will be attracted to buy our products. In this collaboration, we have gained a lot of experience in sales and project research, which has benefited us a lot. After that, we will also more actively promote and improve our product research.
