Jul 15

Jul 15 Reflections on the Americas Venture Creation Lab

The Americas VCL, with participants joining from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Russia, concluded with a final Demo Day in which all nine teams pitched their startup ideas and fielded questions of our judges Jun Axup (Chief Scientific Officer & Partner at IndieBio), Tony Kulesa (Co-founder at Petri) and Ingrid Swanson-Pultz (Chief Scientific Officer at PvP Biologics). The Demo Day judges were joined by our 2020 EPIC Americas mentors and EPIC Americas Committee members to present the following four VCL awards.

Judges’ Choice Award: Epinoma

Epinoma was launched by members from the 2018 UC San Diego iGEM team. Epinoma is a liquid biopsy platform that analyzes epigenetic alterations in the human genome instead of traditional point mutations. During the iGEM competition, the team initially focused on pre-screening for these conditions; however, interviews with physicians after the competition led the team to pivot to the post-therapeutic market. The team joined the 2020 EPIC America's VCL to return to their roots and reconnect with the synbio community, and found themselves able to revisit the fundamentals and polish their narrative throughout the program.

Mentors’ Choice Award: Aminoo

Aminoo evolved from the work of the 2019 Stanford University iGEM team. Aminoo is building a directed evolution platform to create protein products for diagnostics and biosynthesis pathways for a wide range of targets. Once biohackathon competitors, Alec, Ayush and Colin’s relationship has evolved with Aminoo. The three Stanford iGEM alum foresaw the opportunity to innovate protein engineering and design using their shared undergraduate experiences in computer science and synthetic biology. Using cell free systems, Aminoo bypasses the rate-limiting three day incubation period associated with most biological experimentation. With a stronger understanding of their long-term scientific planning, the team ambitiously strives towards the day they can begin saving human lives!

UN Sustainable Development Goals Impact Award: yOil

yOil’s roots derive from research by the 2019 University of Calgary iGEM team. yOIL is cleaning up canola processing, contributing to a 20% yield increase in the process! yOil has worked intricately with their academic and industrial partners to innovate sustainable and cost-saving solutions for the canola industry. Local to Calgary, yOil will help the canola industry to better meet UN Sustainable Development Goals 9, 12 and 17: Industry Innovation and Infrastructure, Responsible Consumption and Production and forming Partnerships for the Goals.

Most Improved Team: Uniphage

Uniphage is creating a smart system for phage innovations in the medical space. Before joining the VCL, Chris and Sofia were long time friends and colleagues. As classmates at Yale-NUS college designing a Capstone project together they were interested in identifying new problem spaces in which they could innovate phage solutions. Having maintained strong, virtual collaboration throughout quarantine, Uniphage was well-prepared to leverage the virtual environment and demonstrated immense continuous iterative growth throughout the VCL program. They’ve decided first to investigate the ag-space and have gotten exciting feedback from early stakeholder discovery interviews.