NU/1246-12 INFOBIOTICA Commercialisation of university research through provision of management skills to assist in successful spin-out company creation

This proposal is to set up a company, InfoBiotica Ltd, to commercialise research derived from Prof. Natalio Krasnogor's research over the last 10 years. InfoBiotica builds upon a rapidly accelerating convergence between information & communication technology (ICT) and biotechnology. In ICT, the speed to market for new software products has accelerated dramatically over the recent years thanks to (amongst other things) advances in continuous integration and deployment where teams of, perhaps geographically distributed, programmers can rapidly test new code and promptly push it to production (that is, to its customers).

As writing and reading DNA becomes routine and pervasive, genetic engineering, i.e., programing biological organisms, becomes more similar to programming computers. InfoBiotica will exploit proprietary software and molecular techniques developed by Krasnogor's research group to accelerate biotechnological programming. In the last 12 months we have secured £15K from the EPSRC "Ideas to Innovation" programme to establish a proof of concept; subsequently secured ICURe funding of £35k (cohort 11) to carry out initial market research, competitor's analysis and to develop a business model canvas; and a further £10K for UX/UI development from HEFCI.