By Iciar Fernandez
Seevasant Indran is a PhD student working on a project that studies mutations, changes and behavior of normal cells that might become carcinogenic. As someone who prefers to do science rather than business, he turned to eHub to find out how he can transform his research into a commercial service.
I am from Malaysia, from Kuala Lumpur. Regarding my background, I did my bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology, and then I was a research assistant back home in Malaysia, mainly to gauge if I wanted to do a PhD. After a while, I decided I did and I came here to UBC to do my PhD in Genome Science and Technology.
Seevasant Indran
My thesis works on variant functionalization; we look at somatic variations and try to figure out a way to profile these variants. Because most of the variants in tumor suppressors and oncogenes are ‘variants of unknown significance’, we have no idea of whether they are harmful or not. So, we are trying to bring this technology as a service for commercialization purposes.
I started looking at any programs that offered entrepreneurship services, and while doing this I found eHub.
Being a science student, I am not familiar with the business end of things. I had actually tried out business before starting my PhD and I didn’t particularly enjoy it, I would rather do science. So I have no experience whatsoever in the business world.
Sometimes an idea will sound logical in the science world, but it is just not a good market fit. So, eHub provided me with this great opportunity, and a lot of tools to learn about business aspects that may not be obvious to me. I feel like the biggest help I’ve received is direction, there is a lot more to marketing than may be obvious and eHub provides you with that direction.
At this point, we have a platform for one gene and we are looking at two other genes. We are a yeast lab so we see our results in yeast and compare them to other animal models. But these are already well established and there is actually a paper coming out on that.
Do you want to know what other students at UBC are doing? Come to our RBC Get Seeded event on November 18, 2019. Students from 15 teams will present their ideas to win the seed money to fund their business. More information and tickets here.
Do you also have an idea and don’t know where to start? Check the eHub page to find out more.
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