Marketing
Overview
Why do we come up with this biosensor? Except for the serious problems which hospitals and medical services, this system in yeast has its unique advantages which current medical detecting appliances don’t contain. In this part, we will introduce these unique advantages of our biosensor. Also, we made a questionnaire about the public’s attitude toward our project. The result is positive.
Advantages of our project
Responding Speed
There are many biosensors made to detect disease biomarkers, while they are either translation-based or mammalian cell based, which means though they are capable of finding that biomarker, they are poor in responding speed and shelf-life. Even for some large instruments in hospital, the speed of them is usually a drawback. These are devastating aspects when we consider making them commercialized and acceptable for every society member. Our project, on the contrary, can respond very quickly since we used a real-time signaling pathway in yeast.
Price of the Product
One of the most critical aspects of a commodity is its price. However, as for domestic-using medical appliance, it is often beyond what people can afford. That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to build such a real-time system. Since the microorganism we use is the most common yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the species you can see presented in the supermarket for bread making, it largely decreases the costs for making one chip.
Potential to Detect a Number of Diseases
GPCR, being a large family of protein-coupled receptor, contains many members which respond to different signals. Ones we achieved building our biosensor, it’s likely that we can develop a series of like products for detecting more physical signs such as glucose and histamine (See more in Project Vision for the Future). That can supply the gap of normal domestic detecting instruments which can only detect one certain physical sign.
Questionnaire
In order to know people’s attitude and willings toward our project, we started a questionnaire. We sent them on the Internet and invited the public to give their answers. See this questionnaire at .
We totally received 209 copies from the Internet. The results are showed below.
Results
Figure 7. Question: Do you agree to use gene engineering products in medical test?
Figure 8. Question: If now you got a domestic gene engineering product. It’s small and convenient to use. It could detect certain diseases without touching you. Are you willing to use it?
Figure 9. Question: Why do you choose to do so?
Figure 10. Question: If you are a doctor, are you willing to recommend this product to your patient?
Analysis
From the results given by the questionnaire, it’s clear that the public hold a positive attitude toward gene engineering product and our biosensor. When asked about their points on medical test products, over 60% of all accepted gene engineering technology to be used (Figure 7). Only a small number were negative about it. As for our product, we only introduced the basic function of our product because we felt it hard for the public to understand theories of gene engineering. People being asked gave us a positive answer on our product (Figure 8 & Figure 9). Specifically, we asked doctors for their willing to recommend this product to patients, considering that if this product is introduced to the market, it will firstly be sold through doctors. Among the doctors we inquired, no one refused to recommend it. We are happy to get these messages which show the positive attitude of the public.
Conclusion
The results given by the questionnaire shows clearly that people don’t refuse to use our product. More importantly, doctors said they will recommend it to their patients. Although there are still a lot remain before our product introduced to the market, we are confident about its further development.
