[pcrh]

If a start-up wishes to make big bucks in biohacking it has to deliver a product that is in wide demand by the general public.

The reagents on sale mentioned (Taq, antibiotic resistance genes and DNA ladders) are to biotech what solder and resistors are to electronics, i.e. very low value products of no use to the general public.

The real hurdle for true "biohacking" is the cost of laboratory facilities and equipment, which can easily run into a million dollars as soon as high speed centrifuges, -70 C freezers, sterile incubators and hoods, equipment for analysis, certified waste disposal facilities, etc, etc, are taken into account.

Compare this to making an app, which costs mostly the developers time and some hardware she already has lying around.

[patcon]

Yes, everyone wants their startup to make big bucks, but how do you do get to the stage of the startup's cheap rapid iteration trope when reagents cost an arm and a leg. There might not be big cash in the domain of cheap reagents, but I would humbly suggest this must be disrupted before biotech gets really exciting. Or at least that we need to consider that maybe it's a foundational need that should take some precedent :)

[pcrh]

So, what can start-ups do to reduce their costs?

For one, they should focus on areas where the reagents are not expensive, e.g. identifying novel natural biological extracts with new activities, consumer genetics (as in 23 and me), or areas such as horticulture. They should avoid things like stem cells and drug development (as opposed to discovery).

[icegreentea]

I should point out that the star of the article (open source taq polymerase) is the bread and butter of genetics research. It is what makes PCR - pretty much the standard way of doing DNA amplification (which any genetics research requires) work.

As it stands now, taq isn't ridiculously expensive, but surely open sourcing will reduce the barrier.

[frisco]

This is what my startup is working on! Check out https://www.transcriptic.com. It's still early days and we'd love feedback.

[dnautics]

I'm not bullish on this field. While there are certain biological operations (e.g. sequencing) that are "embarassingly parallelizable" (to borrow a CS concept), most are not, and require aggressive "interrupt handling".

I make a mutation of enzyme X, then test it. Ok, the procedure works, now let's scale it to 48 mutants. Uh oh, the procedure stopped working at #28. Why? Because the batch number for our competent cells from NEB changed and it no longer accepts our plasmid. (real situation) Etc.

[pcrh]

That looks interesting, but a bit confusing.

Imagine I want to do a PCR but can't do it myself, I must really a) have no bio facilities to speak of, b) don't know anyone else who does. What am I then going to do with the PCR product? Further, presumably I must also sent you the sample to amplify, and what kind of samples am I likely to have if have no bio facilities?

You might want to read the comments made elsewhere about something similar: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/07/09/outsourced_a...