Team:SVCE CHENNAI/Entrepreneurship
Entrepreunership
Business Model Canvas
Having interacted with Paskey diary farms and Vijaya milk industries earlier , and modifying our project such that AMPs were produced upon being added to milk by placing them under the regulation of a lac operon, so that on an industrial scale our system could be used to prolong the shelf life of milk, and presenting our business model to them we were awarded Rs.20000 by Paskey farms and 15000 by Vijaya milk industries.
As you might have seen before, the Lactoshield consists of two membranes, an inner and an outer membrane.We initially selected PVC as the material for the inner membrane.
The properties of PVC that we found desirable were:
- Low cost.
- Easily breakable.
- Can be easily moulded into the desired shape.
But we soon found that PVC was not the ideal candidate for our project as PVC is a carcinogen and its use in a product that comes in such close contact with a food will undoubtedly raise health and safety issues. So we started looking for alternatives to PVC. We soon came upon polycaprolactone. Even though PCL was not the ideal alternative as long as the cost was concerned, it had several properties that were very desirable for our project.
- It is biodegradable.
- Bacillus subtilis cannot degrade it. This means that our sachet cannot be accidentally degraded from the inside.
- Easily available(though costly).
- Nontoxic.
So PCL became the material for our inner membrane. For the outer membrane, we selected dialysis membrane, since we need only the AMPs (around 1kDa) to pass through the outer membrane. Soon, we started to search for alternatives to dialysis membrane and we thought that a silk nanofibre filter made a good choice. This was because silk nanofibre filters are completely biodegradable and come with pore sizes as small as 1nm diameter. But we kept this idea on a hold because of the difficulty in procuring these filters and the possible high cost associated with them.
Then we found out the approximate cost for sachets of four different sizes and made rough estimate. We created a Business Model Canvas for our project.
Cost of System for different sizes of Membrane
| Size (in cm) | Inner membrane* INR | Outer membrane* INR | Growth medium* INR | The bacteria and the genetic engineering involved* INR | Assembly cost* INR | Total* INR | Total* $ | Total* € |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 x 3 | 30 | 16.8 | 1.8 | 10 | 2 | 60.6 | 0.91 | 0.83 |
| 5 x 4 | 90 | 28 | 3.6 | 15 | 2 | 138.6 | 2.08 | 1.89 |
| 6 x 5 | 170 | 42 | 6 | 20 | 2 | 240 | 3.60 | 3.28 |
| 8 x 6 | 320 | 67.2 | 12 | 25 | 2 | 426.2 | 6.39 | 5.82 |
References
Biodegradability and Mechanical Properties of Polycaprolactone composites encapsulating phosphate-solubilizing bacterium Bacillus PG01-Ken-Jer Wu, Chin-San Wu,Jo-Shu Chang-PROCESS BIOCHEMISTRY April 2007.
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