[billiontoone]

If it is specific to COVID-19 testing, we will not seek anything, as long as the end-user is not financially benefiting from it or importantly, selling qSanger kits.

If they need our bioinformatics automation & help with set-up, we would license the method for COVID-19 testing for $3-$5/sample as part of each sample that is being put through our pipeline.

If they ask for 96-well plates with all reagents that are ready to use (so that they just need to add VTM), we would work with manufacturers to produce the reactions and plates, and the price of kit (~$15 per test) would include limited license to use our automated bioinformatics calling pipeline.

[pjschlic]

When you say 'as long as the end user is not financially benefitting' - is the end user the lab conducting the test?

You said in an earlier comment that the reimbursement for testing is too low to justify buying expensive equipment. You are also proposing to charge half the reimbursed rate for it to run on someone else's equipment.

Are the current equipment owners expected to donate this crucial equipment, because if they are the bottleneck, shouldn't they be the ones compensated to encourage more equipment to be made available?

[billiontoone]

$15 is half the price of even the bare minimum qPCR kits (e.g., TaqPath). We need to buy the reagents from NEB, IDT, and others and work with a contract manufacturer to mix it into a reaction. Reagent, manufacturing, quality control, and fulfillment cost already add up to ~$11/reaction. That does not take into account any costs associated with developing the assay, supporting the assay, getting it through EUA, customer service, bioinformatics help. And we have to pre-pay for all of the reagent costs in the anticipation of the volume. I anticipate that we will likely end up net negative with this work, and even if it ends up being slightly net positive, it will not impact our valuation in a positive way.

The current equipment owners are already the clinical laboratories. It is unused capacity for them. Other owners are sequencing service providers. The full cost of running an end-to-end Sanger reaction as a provided service is $2-$6, so at the $50 reimbursement price, the laboratories will still be incentivized.

[chillydawg]

You and your co founder(s) are good people. I'm glad you're in a position to do this. If this works, you'll save lives.

[wbl]

This equipment isn't something a hospital has unless they have a serious desire to do top notch genetic disorder testing, and that kind of hospital is going to use the equipment for this cause. The Abbot machine is something practices with much harder financial constraints have to seriously worry about paying for.