You can buy a ton of very expensive biotech equipment off of ebay for very little, which is what a lot of bootstrapped biotech companies do (plus gov-deals and other pharma auction sites)
Exactly this! (+1 to govdeals too, when the auction is in geographic range) While we've gotten nibbles from accelerators, up to the interview stage, they want to see an MVP before funding us. This is, of course, kind of a non-starter when you don't have 200k lying around for a minimal denovo lab, and there's not much in the way of rental lab space where we are. Thankfully, after four years of grinding on this as our side gig -- and a big slowdown due to the plague -- we've got enough preliminary data to apply for an NIH grant, which we're very optimistic about.
My wife and I have a setup up in our house (it's all GRAS and Biosafety Level 1 stuff) and have mostly bought off ebay and govdeals. She's a neuroscientist and I'm a physics/engineering guy. My job is to handle the business end, acquire gear, and maintain it so that she can science as hard as possible.
Most of our lab gear is 80s and 90s-vintage gear we've fixed up. You'd be amazed what a little analogue electronics knowledge can do here; people will throw out a device rather than replace the belts or motor brushes. We'll get used and broken gear at a fraction of of the cost of new and certified refurb machinery.
I'm currently modding our venerable Labline orbital shaker incubator. Over the course to two months the tachometer and both of the remote bulb thermostats on it went out, so I'm installing a Johnson Controls A421 to manage the heater and adding a $20 Hall effect tachometer to replace the analog tach. The mechanicals are solid, though (got it for $300 plus freight!) and getting another would be a slow expensive crap shoot.
BTW, readers, do you think that there is an audience for a blog that talks about the details of rebuilding old equipment like this? I'm not big on video, so it would mostly be long form writing with lots of images.
I want to point out that it really depends a lot on what kind of lab it is. I think for R&D, buying cheap stuff off of ebay or labx is great.
But if your goal is to eventually scale up and build a production lab, you will need to switch your mindset when you get some funding and buy some decent equipment. It can make a big difference from my experience. My company started out at a sub-par lab space with second hand equipment. When we moved to a very well equipped lab, we found ourselves exponentially more productive. Mainly because we no longer have to constantly second-guessing our results due to sub-optimal equipment/reagents. Re-running experiments because of potential equipment failure adds up in terms of resources and psychological stress.
> Most of our lab gear is 80s and 90s-vintage gear we've fixed up. You'd be amazed what a little analogue electronics knowledge can do here; people will throw out a device rather than replace the belts or motor brushes. We'll get used and broken gear at a fraction of of the cost of new and certified refurb machinery.
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> BTW, readers, do you think that there is an audience for a blog that talks about the details of rebuilding old equipment like this? I'm not big on video, so it would mostly be long form writing with lots of images
I see a business spin: sell shovels for the upcoming biotech boom. Get equipment on the cheap, fix it, reseller it with a warranty.
I'd like that! If you want to get some readers for it, check out the DIYbio forums on google groups. They aren't as active as they were years ago, but there are still a bunch of knowledge people there.