Graduate students Jeffrey Dietrich, Howard Chou, and Eric Steen from the Keasling lab, as well as Angela Won from the Lim lab, participated in the 2009 Idea to IPO class offered by the Center for BioEntrepreneurship at the University of California San Francisco. The class was co-instructed by Steven Burrill, CEO of the life sciences venture capital company Burrill & Company, and is designed for scientists and clinicians interested in entrepreneurship. The team, named Elysium Renewables, developed a business plan around Mr. Dietrich’s PhD work on the in vivo detection of small molecules using transcription factor based biosensors. This technology is used to construct high-throughput screens for the directed evolution of biofuel and commodity chemical producing microbes. At the conclusion of the course, teams competed for a $50K QB3 Biocatalyst Grant by pitching their business plans to a broad selection of Bay Area venture capitalists. The Elysium Renewables team was awarded the grant, which is designed to help de-risk academic technologies and facilitate future start-up funding. The team is actively working on further developing the technology.