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From 2010.igem.org

Campaign Devleopment

Legislative hurdles, extensive testing and patentability are amongst the issues that we would have to consider before production and sale of our nutrient indicator beads. For our campaign, we have designed a hypothetical product and features based on wet lab work and computational modelling to inform the design of a public information leaflet. We acknowledge that there are many further stages of development from lab to commercial use – some of which have also been investigated in detail by previous iGEM teams. To give our public information leaflet more credibility, and to increase our understanding of legislation in the UK and EU, we have investigated some of the main stages of development that would be considered on the way to producing a marketable bead system.

Challenges for releasing our product for real There would be many challenges facing us if we were to want to pursue the option of releasing our product for sale.

These include:

• Patentability: investigating whether our beads, or our idea, can be protected in any way, especially now that we have released it into the public domain via the iGEM competition
• Regulations: in the EU, GMOs have to undergo extensive testing, trials, and approval process involving all member states.
• Economics: producing a viable product for sale that is cheaper to buy than the cost of the fertiliser that could be potentially saved