molave.bio
This is the next company I am building. We are currently in its pre-history:
March, 2019: I wrote this to explore the domain of bioentrepreneurship: How Do You Become a Bioentrepreneur? Note that at this point, I thought low-cost genomics was still years away. That was published March 21, 2019. On March 25, I followed the Oxford Nanopore Twitter account. The research for that piece probably led me to Nanopore. June, 2019: I enrolled in MSc in Biology at Ateneo de Davao University
November 2019: I got some Nanopore library preparation and bioinformatics exposure via Dr. Amanda Warr at Central Luzon State University. She and her colleague, Dr. Christine Burkard, were there to sequence local variants of the African Swine Fever virus.
https://gyazo.com/14f530c8396bd16981d29096946863a5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dl9sZo-0hg
May to October 2020: Built a team in JOGL.io, got a microgrant, partnered with Philippine Genome Center Mindanao https://gyazo.com/9944e7f5ffe8d2d7c8bb1505599e992f
Oct 2020 - Feb 2021: Organized trainings and brought in an ONT MinION and the required reagents March 9, 2021 - First sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 enabled by volunteers and first ever on-site sequencing of any organism in Mindanao, Philippines!
Project managment lessons learned:
https://vimeo.com/528799637
https://gyazo.com/5a80d7d974d52a8d4340d374f7e0212c
June, 2021: Joined the overgrad iGEM team Friendzymes. The biggest obstacle of Project Accessible Genomics turned out to be the difficulty of bringing in reagents. We need to buy them from US/Europe. This is already expensive for a lab in the developing world. Then we discovered that we need to pay an additional 30% to 100% of that cost to gate-keepers, both legal rent-seekers and corrupt ones. Here's the team video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ0cohdZzv4
https://gyazo.com/de8ebcc19d5cd6d4444f7c179f7a5179