BioFounder insights: Uniphage, the story so far!

We caught up with Sofia Sigal-Passeck, Co-Founder and CEO of Uniphage, who is working on eradicating bacterial diseases. Uniphage uses the combined power of deep learning and bacteriophages - which are viruses infecting bacteria only. Uniphage was part of iGEM EPIC’s 2020 program and Venture Creation Labs (VCL). Uniphage also was selected as a finalist team in our end-of-year Startup Showcase under our Food Track, where they got to pitch to curated partners and investors. We were really excited to catch up with Sofia to learn more about Uniphage’s progress since then!

So how did you get started on your entrepreneurial journey?

Chris, Uniphage’s CTO, and I have known each other for a long time. While being in lockdown on different parts of the globe, we started discussing how we, as individuals, could try to prevent another pandemic from taking place. 

This seed grew over time, and we ended up starting Uniphage, whose goal is to eliminate all diseases, starting with bacterial ones. We were very clear on the fact that we did not want to just cure one bacterial disease/set of diseases: we wanted to solve the problem of bacterial diseases in general, for them to never pose any threat to humans again. 

We’re currently developing our platform technology that uses deep learning and bacteriophages, which are viruses infecting bacteria only, to predict exact viral sequences to against any pathogenic cell.

That's great! How did you hear about iGEM EPIC, and how did you transit from that idea to where you are now?

We first heard about iGEM EPIC from an EPIC community member at the National University of Singapore, Cheng Kai Lim.

I think that participating in iGEM EPIC was a really important step for Uniphage. It gave us the opportunity to better define our primary market and narrow down the range of the problems we wanted to tackle. We decided to focus on bacterial diseases in agriculture, primarily, because the regulatory barrier to enter this field is much lower than that for bacterial diseases in livestock production, food preservation, and human diseases. 

After completing the VCL, we continued with Uniphage and got lucky to get accepted into more competitive programs through both iGEM EPIC and outside of it. In our applications, we heavily utilized what we learned during VCL. Step-by-step, we started developing our technology and applying for more funding. Importantly, we have always tried talking to virtually anyone around whose advice could be of any help for Uniphage. This has certainly helped us get to where we are now. However, there is still a very long way to go for us to bring our technology to the market. At our current stage of R&D, we have developed the most efficient to date model to predict bacteriophages that target bacterial pathogens (all as a team of undergrads!). We have also established an amazing academic collaboration and are currently part of the National University of Singapore Incubator. 

Congratulations! That's fantastic news. What advice would you give to other iGEM Biofounders out there who are looking to start their company?

Whatever it is you are thinking of or working on, I think the best thing is to start it and then just go with it. It's not going to be easy and it is a risk, but it's a really fun risk.

What helps me take this risk is thinking: “what if nothing actually works out?” and then going through the worst-case scenario in my head. This tends to be that the company does not work out - and then being okay with whether it does work out or it does not. Realizing that nothing really that bad is going to happen to you if you take this risk right now by starting a company out of your iGEM project, and who knows in the best case scenario, it might even change the world, really helps to overcome doubts in one’s mind.

About EPIC

The Entrepreneurship Program Innovation Community (EPIC) supports the development of iGEM’s entrepreneurial community. We aim to become the driving force behind hundreds of SynBio based start-ups globally to help accelerate our transition to a more sustainable bioeconomy. The core of the program is focused on supporting iGEMers by providing resources and training in biobusiness, and connecting them to relevant co-founders, mentors, accelerators, investors and partners. This is done through a range of activities globally including the Venture Creation Labs, Mentorship Program, Fast Track Program and the annual Startup Showcase.

Feel free to learn more about EPIC and reach out to us if you have any questions to epic@igem.org. If you’d like to learn more, we have an upcoming Hackathon on the 20-21 of March that you can sign up here! If you are inspired by Sofia’s journey and would like to join the VCL and kickstart your startup, apply now here by 29 March!