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Biology colleagues win Global Bio-Based Businessplan competition

Posted on 26 February 2021

Two colleagues from Biology, Alexander Setchfield and Daniel Leadbeater, have won the international Global Bio-Based Businessplan (G-BiB) competition.

Alex is a PhD student and Dan is a post-doc within the research group of Professor Neil Bruce in the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP). They pitched their businessplan around transforming inedible crop residues into sustainable insect feeds to fuel the ever-growing Black Soldier Fly protein market and its scale-up via a potential spin-out company InsBio.

After winning the UK national semi-final on Wednesday 13 January, InsBio progressed to the international final where they faced stiff competition from two other national semi-final winners from Germany and Finland, but emerged as the international competition winners.

Alex and Dan will now access a business mentoring programme by High-Tech Gründerfonds, a German venture capital investor for innovative technologies in fields such as the life sciences and chemistry. Through this, InsBio will prepare for a pitch later in the year with the hope of securing significant investment.

The possibility of translating Alex's PhD work as a real commercial venture is very exciting, and the group are looking forward to making InsBio a real University Spin-out company.