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Autor/a Ibáñez Fort, Joan
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Abstract If we ask anyone about which has been the most googled word in 2020, we have no doubt that this word would be covid. Covid pandemics appeared in our lives to change them and demonstrate the lethality of infections when they are not treated correctly. However, covid is not the only virus that infects people. There is one virus, called cytomegalovirus (CMV from now on) that even if it cannot trigger serious complications for healthy adults, it can for babies and immunosuppressed individuals. For all these patients it is a matter of death or live if they get infected by this virus (and other viruses of course), making the ability to detect when these infections are starting, the most important fact to start the treatment and decrease the risk of having worse complications. To give some data about CMV congenital infections, almost 10% of the babies that are born across the world have inherited this virus from their mother, and only 2% of the babies are screened of CMV and only if they are suspicious of having it. This can lead us to think which are going to be the major trends in the diagnostic medical devices industry and, in fact, for the CMV detection. Having systems that provide a faster result, with more sensibility and specificity can decrease the ratio of patients that die from these complications caused by viral infections, and this is exactly what I am going to present in this project. XIPS is the name of the company I have been setting up in the last year. XIPS is a spin-off of the University College of Dublin that uses all the investigation and research developed by the mechanical engineering department to offer a unique diagnostic device base on CRISPR-Cas13a and microfluidic technology. With the use of CRISPR-Cas13a system we are able to achieve better specificities (up to only 1 missmatch in the DNA detection) and sensitivities (in the range of attomolarity) without giving up on speed and cost of our solution. The diagnostic test sold by XIPS is able to provide a quantitative value of the viral load in the organism in less than 2 hours since the beginning of the process and decreasing the hands-on time of the process to avoid cross contaminations of the samples. Even if right now our tests can only detect CMV, our unique technology offers the potentiality to detect for any viral or bacterial infection. After the market research and the estimation of the units of our product that could be sold when launched in the market, we found an opportunity to create a new company, that more than being sustainable after some time, it is able to generate big cash-flows even in its first year of activity thanks to high margins of the products in this sector and the increase on the demand thanks to the lower price of it. The return on equity estimated for the first year, is more than 75%, and even if we know that predictions are only predictions, they are based on real numbers in which affordable sales volume was considered. This performance is expected to continue in the following years. To stablish the company and to finance its future activities, we would need an investment of 50.000€ to set it up and to start as soon as possible. The vision of XIPS is to not leave any new-born or immunosuppressed person without being tested for viral infections. ¿Do you want to be a part of it? Thank you so much, and we hope to make it possible in the future. The future we create. |
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Director/a Cella Moragón, Albert |
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Degree IQS SM - Undergraduate Program in Business Administration and Management |
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Date 2021-05-27
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