Collaborations
No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.
~ H.E. Luccock
While iGEM is a competition, it is also a platform for collaboration. We worked together with institutions and companies in our region and helped to connect them with enthousiastic students. For many years the Eindhoven teams haven taken a leading role in connecting iGEM teams and we are proud of the collaborations we have been able to establish. Please read more about the events we organized and attended and the resulting connections below.
Mini Jamboree Eindhoven
For many years now the Eindhoven teams have organized the Mini Jamboree. This year's edition will take place on October 7th and different teams from Germany, Belgium, and other Dutch teams are welcome to present their project in front of a jury of experts. The exact teams that are present at this year's Mini Jamboree are: team Aachen, team Wageningen, team Delft, team Leiden, team Düsseldorf, team Leuven, team Frankfurt, team Heidelberg, team Maastricht, team Radboud and lastly team Münster. The Mini Jamboree takes place after the wiki freeze, but before the Grand Jamboree. This gives the teams the perfect opportunity to practice their pitch before the Grand Jamboree. There is a knowlegdable jury present and the opportunity to network with companies in the synthetic biology field. You can read all about it on our Communication page.
Through this collaboration, we get the valuable opportunity to witness the progress made by other iGEM teams before the Grand Jamboree. Organizing the event teaches us how to tackle various challenges, such as the importance of communication and thorough planning. The primary goal of this event is to unite iGEM teams, celebrate our achievement and give them opportunity to practice their pitch before the Grand Jamboree. We hope this Mini Jamboree will become a fun and insightful day for all the teams participating.
Other teams
We attended several meetups with other iGEM teams, such as the BFH meetup in Bielefeld in Germany, the Münster meetup in Germany and we helped organize the Dutch iGEM meet in Utrecht in the Netherlands. We also met up with several Dutch teams where we discussed our projects and the iGEM competition. This all led to a lot of great new connections and collaborations with teams that focused on the same problem as we did. For instance, the Aachen team uses a different approach to the same problem we are trying to solve: tumors that evade the immune system. They knew a lot about the microenvironment of tumors and this improved our understanding of how our treatment could solve this problem. Similarly, the team from Bielefeld worked on a delivery method to the lungs and helped us consider the delivery of our treatment. Finally, we talked the the McMaster team from Canada about the benefit of using bacteria (or in our case vesicles) as a delivery method.
We were not limited geographically. On our personal holidays we met up with iGEM teams from all over the world: UK, Spain, Germany, etc. Each team was very different, not just their project but also their backgrounds and approach to the competition. The diversity of ideas and approaches was very inspiring and we learned a lot from these meetings.
Finally, we established some contacts online via the iGEM community Slack. This was a great way to get in touch with teams that we did not meet in person.
A complete map of all the teams we talked to is shown in the right.
Funding collaboration
Raising the funds required to participate in iGEM is a challenge. The sign up funds alone are a significant amount of money and to do interesting research we need more. In Eindhoven we are very well located to find sponsors and we can use the experience and network of more than ten previous teams. Because of this we wanted to help other teams find sponsors as well by organizing an online collaboration.
We asked teams to fill out a survey so that we could personalize the session. We identified that the most common approaches are funding from the university, company partnerships and crowdfunding. We also got a lot of questions about how to approach companies, how to handle lack of response and how to make a good pitch.
We started the session with a short presentation about our own experiences and our tips. We then had an interactive session where each team could introduce themselves and everyone could give feedback. This led to a lot of different insights and we all learned a lot from each other. There were even some new collaborations that started during the session.
We created a handout with everything we learned that we make available to all iGEM teams. You can find it on the contribution page. The iGEM community manager has even mentioned that they want to promote this material to all teams.
Company collaborations
We worked together with a lot of companies. Most of these collaborations involved sponsorship and us promoting the company to students. A complete list of all the companies we worked with can be found on the sponsors page.
We also made use of the technical and business expertise of some of these companies. For instance, Till Mathan from Johnson & Johnson helped us identify key features to focus on before the market launch. Sacha Massop from Thermo Fisher Scientific helped us set up our business plan. And the architecture of our model was inspired by the Xyna.bio platform of XOLLX Lab.
We also collaborated with Qiagen, where we went to their headquarters in Hilden, Germany. We got a tour of their production process and they showed us their products. You can read more about our visit on the Communication page. We thank Qiagen for inviting us to their headquarters as it was an informative day.
