from the how-to-make-big-business-unhappy dept.
Glyn Moody reports
It's well-known that monopolies can lead to price-gouging, which produces effects like this:
I still have no idea how people can get away with charging several thousand dollars for a milligram of recombinant protein. That's an amount that you can see with the naked eye, if your eyesight is really good, but even then, you can see it only just barely. If you had to make a recombinant protein in your undergraduate biology class, then you know that the cost of doing this is essentially the cost of highly refined sugar water (= culture media) plus the cost of highly refined salt water (= chromatography buffers).
That comes from a fascinating essay by John Schloendorn, founder and CEO of Gene And Cell Technologies, a regenerative medicine startup, which appears in Issue 4 of the BioCoder journal. But here's the strange thing: the biological reagents market may show the classic symptoms of monopoly abuse, but as Schloendorn points out, there are very few actual monopolies here:
The protections of the closed-source biologics vending industry are actually thin as paper and brittle as glass. For most of this stuff, they have no patents, no copyright, no government regulations, hardly a lobby to speak of, and no monopolies of any kind. They manage to lock biotechnology away from new entrants and to keep the cost of doing science in the stratosphere for establishment professionals, solely through the physical possession of the source DNA and by imposing contractual restrictions on those willing to sign them.
Schloendorn notes the parallels with the software market, which also suggests an obvious solution to the problem of exorbitant prices: open-source [sic] biological reagents. That is precisely what Schloendorn has created:
I have synthesized, manufactured, tested, and fully validated a collection of open source plasmids [small circular DNA strands] coding for some of the very basic building blocks of biotechnology. I do charge an initial purchase price to pay for storage, ongoing quality control, and the provision of a reliable source of these molecules. But there is no proprietary barrier of any type on their use. You may grow them on your own, modify them, give them to others, sell them, sell products derived from them, and do whatever you (legally) want to do with them.
What's fascinating here is to see the application of the business model commonly found in the world of open-source software whereby the code is freely available, and customers effectively pay for a service that provides quality control in the world of DNA. Given the easy profits that will be put at risk by this new offering, we can probably expect the same kind of scaremongering and lobbying from the incumbents that free software experienced when it became clear that it posed a serious threat to the traditional, high-margin world of closed-source code.
[Editor's Note: The submitter pointed out that the article contains references to "Open Source" - where there is no source code. More correctly, this should refer to free, libre open knowledge (FLOK).]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AnonTechie on Saturday August 16 2014, @10:03AM
I am happy to see such an effort in biological sciences. It would be great if there are more people who embrace OPEN KNOWLEDGE philosophy.
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 5, Informative) by opinionated_science on Saturday August 16 2014, @12:51PM
An interesting article and broadly correct, although I will point out a few things.
First, the cost of a recombinant protein is highly sensitive to *which* protein you are trying to produce. Membrane proteins are technically very difficult and also a highly prized product.
A major use for >1mg of pure protein is X-ray crystallography, and although growing protein crystals is very much an art!!
Since the "target protein" will not crystallize with out other modifications (e.g. add T4-lysozome, thermostablization mutations etc..), and there are other expression systems (yeast, insects), the costs can be quite horrendous!!
And to provide some numbers I know of one membrane protein that only produces approx. 1ug from 20l of culture. Ok this is E.coli expression system, but you get the idea... If you need 1mg, now you need 20,000l of culture!!!
Ultimately the article is spot on , with the restraint that reagents need to be of very high quality - this might justify some of the cost.
When you get the DNA source to work from, I must agree, it does remove some of these issues.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 16 2014, @03:47PM
What is the practical application of this? Can I test my girlfriend for STDs DIY? ;-)
Cure trivial health problems? test for toxins? sequence DNA?
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday August 17 2014, @02:46PM
That's easy. If it burns when you pee, she has one.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Saturday August 16 2014, @06:30PM
Recapitulate ("recap") is to summarize. I suspect the company would much rather "replicate" OSS' success rather than merely provide us with a summary of that success -- we can get such summaries anywhere.
/gramNazi
(Score: 2, Informative) by turonah on Monday August 18 2014, @09:24AM
There is a second definition of recapitulate, which according to Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recapitulate [merriam-webster.com]), is "to repeat the principal stages or phases of". Given the context, this is likely the intended meaning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 17 2014, @01:02AM
The recombinant protein is likely for molecular biology or biochemical studies - not for your fucking diet. It is also not the same as what some idiot did in some undergraduate class.
If the protein is an enzyme or an antibody, then it is likely that a miligram could be used for more than a thousand reactions ($5 per reaction). Acting like it is laundry detergent is deceptive and does not instil confidence in the CEO's scientific integrity.