Team:Virginia/Interviews/Industry Interviews
As our first of many company interviews, we went into our interview with Markus Gershater, a representative from Synthace, with several questions. Also, Markus gave us several tips on asking questions and even provided us with important questions to ask companies about biocontainment in future interviews.
Regarding our project, he stressed the importance of determining measures of success for our project before beginning lab work. He prompted us to consider the following questions in determining measures of success:
- How easily can the genetic construct get out?
- What will it take to break down our system?
- What characterizations will be made about our system to ensure ours is sufficient?
- What level of effectiveness would be sufficient for industry to adopt our system?
With these considerations, we were able to form goals for our project. He also mentioned the importance of flexibility and sensitivity to the suggestions of stakeholders. Additionally, he recommended contacting companies that use genetically modified organisms for real-world purposes to get a better idea of how our project would be used in these industries. Overall, our interview with Synthace proved to be an invaluable guide for shaping the rest of our company interviews and finding new biotech companies to speak with.
Green Biologics: Laboratory and Scale-Up
We interviewed a representative from Green Biologics, a biotech company located in the United Kingdom, as a part of our company interviews to understand the role of our biocontainment method in an industrial application. Although Green Biologics most readily uses directed evolution to produce the chemical products they need, they still offered many opinions on the use of modified organisms in industry. Additionally, they expressed a need for an effective biocontainment method in future scale-up operations of their laboratory into a small-scale factory.
After explaining the biocontainment method, the main concerns that Green Biologics had were cost and ease of use. These concerns are valid, because it is difficult to pay for an expensive biocontainment method during scale-up. They also stressed that if biological containment is going to be used, translatability between strains of organisms would be very useful for a company.
Green Biologics said that there would be a future market for our project if a risk assessment proved that our method was in fact better than other methods in terms of actually containing the organisms, and if we can prove that our method is simpler to implement than other current methods. If these conditions were satisfied, they believed that our method could be a very useful tool in industry. Although they did not believe that there should be a biocontainment standard, they did believe that the consideration of biocontainment is crucial for any company working with potentially hazardous organisms.
Monsanto: Agriculture
We interviewed a representative from Monsanto to get the perspective of a more controversial corporation when it comes to synthetic biology. Monsanto is an American multinational agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation that was one of the first companies to apply biotechnology to agriculture. They have been in the news for several biotechnology controversies, but we weren’t there to get the scoop on their business practices. Instead, we hoped to gain some feedback from a larger company on our biocontainment method.
We spoke with one of the lead scientists from Monsanto, Daniel A. Goldstein, M.D, for the interview, and he provided us immediately with the history of Monsanto and its use of synthetic biology in their products. He mentioned that Monsanto was not currently researching new genetically modified organisms, but that our project may be useful in the future when Monsanto goes back in that direction or useful on products that already existed. He also pointed us towards bioremediation as a potential other industry for our product.
His main concerns with our biocontainment method involved the implementation into plants, with considerably different genetic mechanisms than bacteria, and the influence of the methods on crop yield, especially in low-income populations. After the interview, we conducted extensive research to identify potential solutions to his posed problems or modifications to our method. This interview also caused us to consider the price of implementing our biological containment device on such a large scale in a soil environment.
Gregory Mandel: Bioremediation
We spoke with Gregory Mandel, Dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law, in the beginning of our biological containment policy proposal creation. Given his background in writing about biocontainment policy (example: Managing Risks of Synthetic Biology: Assessing the U.S. Regulatory System Microbes Engineered for Chemical Production or Bioremediation), we felt as if he would help inform our policy proposal and we hoped to gain valuable information while we were beginning to pursue bioremediation as a potential use of our project.
During the interview, we asked him several questions about current regulations and possible changes that could be made to them in the future. He felt as if the biggest issue facing bioremediation and it’s policy was biocontainment because it is important to protect the environment from potential hazards. Some concerns he raised were about the modified organism's ability to outcompete other organisms in their natural habitat, or whether the modified organisms could survive on a different material than the one they were created to need. He pointed us in the direction of looking at new policy, and encouraged us to inform ourselves further on the current regulations facing synthetic biology.
Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority: Wastewater Treatment
Through our human practices work, we aimed to identify feasible industrial application realms for our project. Many synthetic biology projects, both within and external to the iGEM competition, focus on pollution treatment in water systems. We postulated that our project would be an excellent complement if used in conjunction with existing biological wastewater treatment. We toured the Rivanna water and sewer plant in Charlottesville and spoke with company leaders about our project.
After learning more about their specific containment methods, we determined that our project has no application for water treatment. Rivanna already had robust physical containment methods in place that were more effective and cost-efficient than our biocontainment method. Although disappointing at first, our tour to Rivanna revealed a silver lining. The tour erased our misguided preconceptions about potential applications for our project. This realization inspired us to actively reach out to industry leaders and synthetic biology experts to fill our evident knowledge gaps - the interviews that proceeded not only strengthened our human practices strategies and industry knowledge, but benefitted our lab work as well. Our interview with Rivanna allowed for a critical and enlightening shift in our human practices approach.
