The Company
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Executive Summary
The Company
Illinois Synth was formed in June 2012 to develop, market, and license products intended to further the progress of synthetic biology. Our founding team is comprised of six University of Illinois undergraduate students from a variety of backgrounds including bioengineering, biochemistry, molecular biology, agricultural engineering and chemical engineering. Brought together initially by the desire to work with synthetic biology in the context of the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, we are now in the process of commercializing our research.
The Products
The two product lines being developed by Illinois Synth are as follows:
- - Gene Expression Modulator (GEM) Toolkit – a PUF protein domain-based customizable ssRNA-specific toolkit to modulate and regulate gene expression.
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- - In Vivo Optimized Piceatannol Cascade (IOPiC) – an RNA-scaffold based enzymatic conveyer belt designed to produce piceatannol from L-tyrosine.
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The Market
Ever since the discovery of restriction enzymes in 1978, a new era of synthetic biology was ushered in, an era in which scientific discovery would meet engineering, and promised the ability to eventually control and modulate gene expression. Illinois Synth has a deep confidence not only in the growth of synthetic biology as an industry, but in the growing demand for technologies that will allow the modulation of gene expression in RNA. Such tools currently take the form of RNA recognition motifs, K Homology proteins, and CCCH Zinc Finger proteins that in many cases do not exhibit sequence specific binding, or are unable to be programmed to recognize specific, desired ssRNA sequences. With regard to the use of an in vivo enzymatic cascade to produce piceatannol, our analysis has shown that such a method would be faster, more efficient, and lower cost than chemical synthesis of the compound, which is the only current mode of production.
Competitive Analysis
Our competitive analysis was broken into two components:
- - Analysis of alternative RNA-binding proteins
- - Analysis of alternative ways to produce piceatannol
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