Week 6

Week 6

Hi, My name is Kush Rastogi and this is my private blog for IEOR 185.

To this point, my team, Pied Piper, has been working well together, but our project is facing some major hurdles. In the past few weeks, we decided on using the famous CRISPR patent championed by Professor Doudna, but we have had difficulty reaching out to the CRISPR team for more comments on the patent and how we could potentially turn it into a business. This is a little concerning to me as it seems many other teams have already selected their patent and have the wishful blessings of the professors whose research the patent came from. 

However, just this week, I was able to talk to individuals from Berkeley IPIRA who handle all inquiries related to valuable Berkeley IP. According to these individuals, a company based off of the CRISPR patent would need to have significant capital to begin with, and therefore any startup involved with this work would most likely not be able to provide any therapeutic help - their help would most likely be restricted to research and development or similar work. This is a little disappointing for us as we would have also liked to go into therapy, but my team and I are okay with moving forward as a R&D focused company.


In terms of our team dynamics, I believe that we have set a solid foundation for future work. To start with, our team has a healthy split of engineers and business students to provide different perspectives on major issues. On top of this, we have students from the Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior grade levels, which gives us further exposure to different points of views. I think this is especially important because I believe students tend to confine their world view more and more the higher their education gets. Having a range of team members gives us the benefit of experience and of curiosity.

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