Biotech in the Garage

Re:Biotech in the Garage by charlesdenault on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @03:15PM (#9847490)

With a formal education in biology, I've always thought the industry was much like the computer industry a few decades ago. Jobs & Gates arguably took something that was limited to corporations and Universities, and brought it to the masses. It's a matter of time before there's a startup that revolutionizes something from their garage. Just think where we were before PCR was around, imagine what's next? With open source tools, OpenWetWare, etc, it's lowering the barriers to entry. Who says it's restricted to pharma and human clinical trials? There's plenty of room for innovation in many other areas (GMOs, synthetic bio, methods, tools).

Plus, Bill Gates (loosely) agrees. [0]

[0]: http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biolo...

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Re:Biotech in the Garage by atmosx on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @03:20PM (#9847512)

The difference in biotech is that you have very little room for mistakes. In most cases (at least the ones that really matter) you have patients to deal with, not users which is a different target group. It bears a different kind of responsibility.

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Re:Biotech in the Garage by DaveWalk on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @03:54PM (#9847688)

I don't think you're the first person to have this vision, and most all bio-entrepreneurs I've spoken too felt this way at some point. Right now there's quite a gulf between the technology we have and the masses' utility for it.

While I have never gotten use out of OpenWetWare's wiki of loosely edited protocols, I could see companies with the nonprofit mindset of Addgene paving the way for that visionary future.

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Re:Biotech in the Garage by DaveWalk on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @04:29PM (#9847876)

But actually, the more I think about it, I enjoy your analogy. The missing tools for sure in "DIYbio" are consumer-oriented lab technologies. Something like a 3D printer for budding biologists to gather themselves around...but nothing really comes to mind. Even a homebrew qPCR machine or sequencing platform leaves out many cruicial components like incubators, ultracentrifuges, etc. Can't even get started on mass spectrometers, flow cytometers or other "Core" technologies that not even every lab can own.

To stretch the analogy more, though, I don't think there is a "Homebrew Biotech Club" in the same groovy, sharing sense than that which Jobs and Gates had way back when.

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