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This is really remarkable. I've used Transcriptic in a research setting for a while now. From a user's perspective, it's like looking into the future, and it's
by jkimmel 12y ago
This is really remarkable.
I've used Transcriptic in a research setting for a while now. From a user's perspective, it's like looking into the future, and it's awesome.
From the business side, this makes YC a more attractive option for biotech startups. The life sciences are still very capital intensive. While the New YC Deal helps in this department, many businesses still need to look toward an STTR/SBIR grant from the NIH to get to the stage where they have a product to show investors.
Moves like this probably won't change that for a ton of companies, but there are a few on the margin who may be able to pursue an idea through YC with the benefit of the extra $20K in fuel.
- pw 12y agoHow does Transcriptic stack up in terms of price? Is it prohibitively expensive for lots of stuff or is it a viable option?
- danieltillett 12y agoGrad students are hard to compete against.
- jkimmel 12y agoWe find it to be pretty competitive for our needs (PCR, genotyping, long-term storage). PCR is something like ~$1.50/rxn with our standard genotyping protocol, which works out to ~$0.30-0.40 more than the same reaction run in house. If I recall correctly, the cost per rxn goes down if you run more in parallel, because they share the same instrument time. Setting up that reaction might take me ~0.5 hours base, and 0.05 hours for each subsequent reaction prepared in parallel. Grad students are cheap, but even valuing my skilled labor at minimum wage, it's cheaper to use Transcriptic.