Biotech is certainly exciting on the cost front as technology progresses, however, there is an even easier win which is bringing price transparency to supplies and reagents.<p>We've worked with every YC biotech company (except Ginkgo) and the savings is massive verse paying list price. Startups are unable to negotiate competitive prices from large distributors due to their limit budgets so we've been pooling their purchasing power.<p>Recently, we've started doing analytics (<a href="http://labspend.com/" rel="nofollow">http://labspend.com/</a>) for labs on supplies/chemicals and see huge differences even in universities that spend 10+ million per a year.<p>Here is an example from four universities located in the midwest of the USA for a commonly used chemical reagent called acetonitrile.<p>List price for this item is currently at $1335.49 (<a href="http://www1.fishersci.com/ecomm/servlet/fsproductdetail_10652_679239__-1_0" rel="nofollow">http://www1.fishersci.com/ecomm/servlet/fsproductdetail_1065...</a>) and here is what university labs are paying $399.31, $239.16, $220.54, $156.10 - image: <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7671582/chemical-pricing.png" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7671582/chemical-pricing...</a> ).<p>We commonly see 10x savings, but even in this example 5x can be quite significant in the budget of a start up.
I know it's a bit OT as these companies are more established, but what listed stocks show some promise in BioTech that are worth watching? (Both big and small)
Any news from the YC-backed Immunity Project? Seems like nothing new on their blog or Twitter feed since 2014:
<a href="https://www.immunityproject.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.immunityproject.org</a>
(Disclaimer/shameless advertisement: I am a co-founder of a project in the problem domain. We are currently in seed stage, fundraising mode, and are going to have a look at the U.S. east/west coast soon).<p>I am quite happy to see YC to jump on the SynBio train. While other specialized accelerators such as <i>IndieBio</i> [1] have been first in this fairly unclaimed industry sector, I expect their involvement to trigger a cascade in professional investment that will help the bulk of us to get more money. In contrary to software (and for a multitude of reasons), biotech investments have recovered at a much slower pace since the 2008 crash.<p>If I get around to make a solid write up, I would like to compare the wet/hardware biotech startup accelerator experience. As in software, biotech tools have made a great improvement and became cheaper by orders of magnitude. However, the development workflow is still different, and many things such a reproducibility, lab environment, specialized talent are not as easy to come by in a lean and fast accelerator program. 3 month to MVP is a true challenge - we were quite lucky that we made it [2].<p>Biotech can be far more complicated as software on the business side of things, and going lean is often not really an option (think production standards, ISO/cGMP). A 1:1 copy of the software accelerator model is definitely not enough.<p>[1] <a href="http://indie.bio" rel="nofollow">http://indie.bio</a>
[2] <a href="http://sothicbio.science" rel="nofollow">http://sothicbio.science</a>
Makes sense to me. I was talking to a trader the other day and I asked if he bought when Hilary's comments drove the prices down. Seems he turned a pretty penny for his firm.<p>The technology required is becoming more accessible, the research and break throughs certainly aren't going to stop, I guess the big question really becomes, which companies? Unless there's a bubble, because the profits don't materialize (in which case progress would slow only to pick up again down the road I figure).<p>Of course, you could probably buy a fund which tracks that particular segment of the market.