Digital Forest

From 2015 to 2020, together with Reservas Votorantim, I had the opportunity to execute a really amazing project: The Digital Forest. The project aimed to speed up drug discovery through plant genome mining and was based on the belief that bioinformatics could unveil new drug architectures stored in plant genomes, reducing the time and cost of the process. We had access to the largest private chunk of atlantic forest in Brazil, Legado das Águas, and built  the largest proprietary data bank of plant genomes from a tropical forest in the world. The project had a lot of projection in the media and was awarded the Innovation award in the global event of Eisenhower Fellowships in 2017. However, we couldn’t find a viable business model to monetize the project. Although we identified products that could go on pre-clinical trials, we were too far away from the market to make it happen in the Brazilian innovation ecosystem. Nonetheless, we still have the largest database of genes of the Atlantic Forest, which could be leveraged for future research and development in the healthcare industry.