How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

Are you really doing this at home, in a room converted to a lab, with actual live biology?

I did that in my garage but after having to clean up a big contamination and debug experiments due to temperature fluctations, I realized there was a reason people use real labs.

Yes I am really doing this at home with actual living biology.

Garages are terrible for biotech because of contamination problems. I have a bedroom that I've sealed quite well with 2 box fans constantly running filtering the air (tape a 20x20 filter to a box fan and it works great). When I work with media or anything I also use a flame. I still have some problems with contamination, but it is manageable.

There are also biological ways to get around contamination problems. So long as your media is clean, if you use a strain like Vibrio natriegens, it just outgrows literally everything, so it's not that big of a worry.

I have a few ruuvitags + a raspberry pi to monitor the temperature, and I live in Coastal California, so we don't have that much fluctuation. It hasn't mattered for my experiments, anyway, which are mainly just DNA cloning.

I completely agree with your point about being good at software/hardware/biology is the key to running a successful production biotech lab because you can try to supplement various weak points with the other domains. I've been 3d-printing devices that helps with DNA extraction in my lab.

I am interested in automating the lab I am running now. We have an opentrons that we bought couple years ago that I never got around to using. But now that we are regularly getting a decent amount of samples in a week, I really want to get it going. Are you starting a lab automation service?

I agree with your point about plate sealer/unsealer. It is a huge pain point in automation. However, I am not sure if you can convince regulatory bodies to approve it. Are you doing some kind of mineral oil top layer to prevent evaporation? We've actually tried that before and it kinda worked, but the problem is that the mineral layer messes with the SPRI bead purification step. I am sure it can be solved with more testing, but it just wasn't worth the inconsistency at the time.

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'm starting what could be thought of as a DNA cloning company. So sort of automation service, but for one specific application.

> Are you doing some kind of mineral oil top layer to prevent evaporation

The opposite: the process is pretty much based off of dessication (plus a little bit of tube opening by the bots for important chemicals). For thermocycling stuff, I'm planning on just using Opentrons module with the reusable seals. I really wanted to find a way to use reusable seals everywhere, but I just couldn't think of a way to do it well robotically. Thankfully, I don't need to convince the regulatory bodies of anything, since I'm just doing DNA cloning.

> We have an opentrons that we bought couple years ago If you need to do multichannel stuff, do yourself a favor and go buy Gen2 multichannels and toss your old Gen1. The Gen1 multichannels are hilariously unreliable, but the Gen2 are pretty solid. Love those bots overall though - I got two of em so I can work in parallel!