State of Research
How I started my company and why–Inaugural Event by San Diego Entrepreneurs Exchange (SDEE)
For current graduate students, postdocs, and holders of other “in-transient” positions in bioscience-related fields today, a persistently resounding question on our minds is “What path should I follow at the end of a long and ragged journey of training?” Interestingly in our industry, like downhill skiing you see in the Winter Olympics, once you start one path it is not an easy switch to get on another.
Many of the Ph.D.s in biomed share the general view that an independent research position typically at an academic institute or non-profit organization such as San Diego’s local Salk, Scripps, or Sanford—Burnham, is the goal of the many years of training. Others soon realize that there are numerous research jobs at biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies that will make good use of their expertise, experience, and unique background knowledge in a particular field. And of course there are those who “defect” to different industries that may or may not directly relate to their extensive experience in wet labs, such as working in intellectual property laws, clinical trial management, biomedical sales, business development and management.
Research in major pharmaceutical companies (big pharma) normally focuses on a project with set goals, milestones, and layers of monitoring and management. That is how a large team can function together and get the tasks done in a timely manner. Working in smaller biotech companies can be much more flexible, researcher-initiated, and in many ways fun. On the other hand, you will be required to do much more than reading papers, designing experiments, obtaining and interpreting results. Starting a small biotech company is by no means an easy path to take, but if done correctly with some luck and a lot of determination, it can be a very rewarding career. You will get to utilize to the maximum extent of all your intelligence, knowledge, vision, and personal relations. You also have the opportunity to do real cutting-edge research in various areas, and see the fruits in journal publications, grant awards, as well as in the wild wide market.
The San Diego Entrepreneurs Exchange (SDEE) was founded by local San Diego entrepreneurs in order to provide a voice for the early stage technology startup, to encourage new entrepreneurs, and to sponsor networking and educational events that help develop the skills necessary to bring funding and business to the San Diego area.
The inaugural SDEE event to be held Wednesday March 10th at 5pm. It will help answer some of the questions you may have been thinking about regarding starting or working in a startup biotech company. Allele Biotech’s founder and CEO Dr. Jiwu Wang will be among the speakers. Ten years ago Dr, Wang was a postdoc at UCSD with an NIH fellowship, right before he started Allele with a number of NIH small business innovative research grants. He will talk about the ultimate “academic freedom”–doing any research you want but completely at your own risk– as the reason to start a technology-focused company, and the lessons he learned the hard way about running a lab vs organizing a business. Other speakers include CEOs from a number of San Diego biotech companies with great stories to share with postdocs and others. The talks will be brief yet informative, and on-site interactions are encouraged. The Sanford-Burnham building 12 is outside the main campus, with plenty of free parking. Click here for more details about the event. http://www.allelebiotech.com/allele3/SDEE-First-Event-Announcement.pdf (at AlleleNews). Let us know if you are coming by emailing to events@sdentrepreneurs.org
New Product/Service of the Week 02-15-10 to 02-21-10: Viral shRNA design and packaging services, packaging 2ml virus at 10e8 TU/ml for less than $1,400.
Promotion of the Week 02-15-10 to 02-21-10: FREE spreading beads (ABP-CE-CCCSB100, 500) to go with any competent cell order.
10 Ways to Stay Green in the Lab in 2010
It is hard to do in this business. Numerous consumables, single-use everything to maintain experiment integrity, and constantly ordering reagents with all that packaging! It is a never ending stream of materials that go into experiments dealing with such small molecules. Hope is not lost- there are a few cheap and easy things we as bench scientists can do to help make our labs a little greener.
1 Always recycle- It is mandatory now for most companies and organizations to recycle (especially in California) if they produce more than 1 dumpster full of trash per week. You can do your part in the lab by always putting non-toxic/hazardous recyclables in the recycle bin! Even here in the Allele labs I often find Kimwipe boxes, glove boxes, and even plastic drinking water bottles in the trash and have to fish them out. Always recycling is an easy and, best of all, free thing to do to make your labs more earth friendly.
2 There’s no place like the correct waste receptacle- Every type of waste has its place. Be nice to the earth by putting biohazard in the biohazard, sharps in the sharps, organic solvent waste in the organic solvent waste drum etc.
3 Shut it down!- Always turn off your computer and unused equipment. You can save about $250 per computer per year just by shutting it down every night. Turning off other equipment like the UVP is easy to forget too. Just powering off that at night saves energy and extends the life of the bulb which also saves your lab some cash.
4 Look for ethidium bromide alternatives- This is a work in progress. With all the controversies regarding SYBR and DAPI in their function and mutagenic qualities it seems that there is a call for development of a legitimately safe method to visualize DNA and RNA. Allele is on the case and hopes to have something in the pipeline soon!
5 Swap your boxes- Styrofoam is a necessary evil in the lab. It is the easiest way to transport your temperature sensitive reagents and diagnostics; it is lightweight so it does not add too much to your shipping charges. The bad news is (until better recycling is implemented) that one styrofoam box will be here forever! If you have no occasion to reuse your styrofoam within your own institution there is good news. There are companies out there who will buy your used styrofoam boxes, like Allele with its Box Swap Program, so at the very least that styrofoam box can be used a few more times, eliminating the need to buy it brand new and decreasing demand for this material. If you cannot take advantage of our program then set one up for your own company!
6 Only use dry ice when you have to- If your shipment only requires -20 degrees C for a single day transit time blue ice will work! I have seen it more than I can say when we get a robust reagent sent to us in dry ice with priority shipping. Within the US, priority shipping usually means a transit time about 20 hrs. This last time I saw a small vial in the box which had ~7 lbs of dry ice. This much dry ice will keep a 2lb object frozen for about 24 hrs and someone used it to ship a 10g vial that only needed to be stored at -20 deg C for about 20 hrs! If they had used a 12oz blue ice pack they would have saved on shipping and packaging and we would have been able to reuse the pack, furthering our green endeavors.
7 Close the sash!- This is another great and inexpensive way to save the environment and some money. Closing the hood sash, incubator doors, and refrigerators adds up; constantly leaving them open add up too!
8 Back that thing up!- Since we are lab folk we do not have as many crazy office chain emails going around but I checked and yesterday I sent out 17 emails and received a few more than that! Days like that I shudder to think that there are people out there who receive more than I do on a daily basis and print out every single one for their “records”. This is madness. Please remember to not print emails unless you really need a hard copy. It’s just as easy to save it in a computer file and back your file up.
9 Talk about it- Those motivational types tell you to talk about your goals to others as a means of supporting and motivating yourself to accomplish said goals. Talk to your lab mates and ask them things they can think of to green up your lab. Do not feel weird about seeming “nerdy” by supporting the environment. Chances are, if you work in a lab everyone thinks you are a big nerd already!
10 Network green- I do not like business cards. They are usually made of paper, come in obscene quantities, and do not get recycled. If your title changes or you switch companies you have to go a buy thousands more to update your info. Additionally, they are only for work; there is no social aspect to them and they are too small to really put all your contact info on. Good news is you can go green in networking with Pokens! Pokens are these amazing little animal and people shaped devices that store all your contact info including your company’s website, your email, your social networking pages (i.e. facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone numbers, and whatever else you want. When someone else has a Poken you can “high-four” them and your contact info is swapped. Your Poken can hold many profiles and when it gets full you can load them onto your address book on your computer. There is an upgraded model specifically for business that is not animal shaped and is a zip drive as well. They are relatively new to America and I am one of the many campaigning for them to revolutionize the business card industry! I have two- one for work and one for play.
Allele Biotech Spotlight Promo for ASCB Dec 09 Meeting!
This year our President and CEO, Dr. Jiwu Wang Ph.D., will be presenting at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Diego, December 5th through 9th. Dr. Wang will be presenting results of two studies that involved the Allele Biotech Fluorescent Proteins and iPSC product lines:
Monomeric photoconvertable fluorescent protein variants produced by directed evolution for brightness and efficient photoconversion – a collaborative effort with the Campbell lab at the University of Alberta
Increased efficiency and speed of reprogramming of human cells into induced stem cells using high-titer lentiviral vectors encoding cell cycle progression and survival genes – a collaborative effort with the Chang lab at the University of Florida
In honor of this prestigious occasion Allele Biotech is having a Spotlight Promotion on all Fluorescent Protein and iPSC Products! The promotions, which will vary from product to product, will include 10% and 20% off price reductions, FREE shipping, and even “Buy 2 get one Free” deals!
Products eligible for the Spotlight Promotions begin with:
ABP-FP-____ Catalog
ABP-SC-____ Catalog
To qualify for these promotions you must be attending the ASCB meeting in San Diego and provide us with a copy of your registration form or be one of our loyal facebook, twitter, or myspace friends. Any questions can go to oligo@allelebiotech.com
Call for details and ask for info on the Spotlight Promotions! Offers good now through December, 9th 2009!
New Product of the Month 11/23-29/09: ThermoExp500 PCR machine (thermocycler) $4,250.00, with almost twice as fast temperature ramping as MJ’s TC1000, and more reliability.
Competition from the Marketplace to the Courtroom
The hottest subject in the biological research equipment field has to be whole genome sequencing; hence it is no surprise that companies execute mergers and acquisitions in order to position themselves to go after their competitors in an attempt to corner this valuable market.
A bit of the background history: Illumina was started a decade ago to build DNA chip arrays by people with experience at Affymetrix, when the latter was the first and absolute leader in the DNA chip field. For years, rather than providing DNA chips, Illumina was known for generating revenue by selling oligonucleotides at 20% of the prevailing market price, essentially starting the low end oligo market. Just three or four years ago, it was a front page promotion on Invitrogen’s website to sell Illumina’s oligos through a production/shipping alliance, a cooperation previously unheard of in our field for such low price, non-commodity products. This move quite probably contributed to the decisions made by the more dedicated oligo company, IDT, to acquire local oligo production houses and move to the West coast (Allele opted out of such an acquisition and later did one of its own by taking over Orbigen and since moved into the viral systems and antibody fields). At that point when whole genome sequencing technologies were becoming mature and marketable, Illumina had performed brilliantly in out competing the previously dominant chip supplier Affymetrix, acquired Solexa, and quickly moved into the whole genome sequencing with Genome Analyzer and Genome Analyzer II, a move Affi’s management probably regretted not making.
In the years roughly around 2005-2007, Applied Biosystems, Inc. (ABI) was developing its own genome analysis equipment, the SOLiD system. It surely had a solid base to build on from its strong leadership in providing sequencer and analyzers for many years. Earlier in the year Invitrogen and ABI merged to form Life Technologies, pitching Invitrogen (now LifeTech) and Illumina in a collision course in battle for dominance in genomic analysis. In September, LifeTech brought suit against Illumina for patent infringement; in October Illumina countered with suits of its own. While the fight in court may be long and only sprinkled with occasional fireworks, the competition in the market could be fierce and should ultimately decide on whose technology is superior and offered at better prices. From the technical presentation made by sales teams to us during on site seminars, Solexa’s science sounded better. I was sitting next to Jay Flatley, CEO of Illumina at a San Diego biotech CEO dinner, and heard him predicting that the technology would advance and in a few years, one could get their own genome sequenced for about a thousand dollars, ~10% of the current cost! That’s simply innovation and competition at work. But watch out, a new wave of sequencing technologies based on single molecule capture might make the Illumina and LifeTech courtroom argument a moot point in the market.
The economy recession is most likely over, says who?
The economy recession is most likely over, or so says the federal reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. Do you feel it? Are you seeing increased job opportunities when you leave your current lab or security if you have a post-postdoc position? In our industry, where the health of the economy is mostly measured by research budgets of individual labs or research groups, occasionally by budgets for contracting or licensing fees, the change, if any, is still hard-to-find. But hiring at academic institutes like UCSD seems to have picked up lately, probably due to addition grants from the Obama administration’s stimulus programs. At the same time, individual NIH R1 grants have been creeping up to easily around 1 million a year, program grants 3-5 millions. With more stimulus money kicking in to academic labs this fall, it is expected that the situation will further improve. Comments welcome.
Notes about recent jobs in Pharma/Biotech: since our last blog about massive Pfizer layoff of scientists in 02-09-09, a major layoff in the big pharma sector came from Merck, which announced on 06-11-09 that it would cut 16,000 jobs after completing its merger with Shering Plough. On 09-14-09, Eli Lilly reported job cots of 5,500 or roughly 14% of its work force. There are areas in the country where people report about the economy as “I went to 2 grocery stores and 3 discount department stores over one weekend, and you could do cannon shooting practice in there without hitting a person.” Again comments welcome here, if you believe in a turnaround, or it is all doom and gloom to you. Btw, the History channel has been cranking up the 2012 theories for a couple of months now, if you like the doom and gloom theories.
Note added in proof: As reported in Science yesterday, “a new analysis of the grantsmaking process at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lifts the veil on how many grant proposals are funded even though they fall below a cutoff based on peer-review scores…at least 19% of NIH’s basic research portfolio is funded for reasons that go beyond quality.”
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