Francis Collins On the Job

Dr. Collins did a town hall meeting style announcement his first day as NIH Director on Aug 17th, 2009. He laid out his view for the NIH: more funding (good), encouraging young scientists (good, average age for first own funding for US biologist is 42, not good), and staying open in communication with society it is serving.

The NIH has $30.9 billion budget for 09 and 2010 thanks to the stimulus addition of $10 billion/year. However, it will feel dried up after two years if the budget plan remains as is. The Obama administration does not seem to want increase the basic research but instead focus more on health care management.

Collins is a well admired director and established scientist. However, it may be a little concerning that he might be too much into “big science” and organized efforts. I don’t know what they teach in graduate classes now but from what I was told 20 years ago curiosity-driven science is the best science and that was what got the US to the dominant leadership in biomedical fields.

Talking about nurturing young scientists, big programs and big labs controlling most grants by proposing big science seem trendy these days. The fight to become one of the big guys in a small, crowded field is a really daunting path for young researchers to tread. The big guys have the say from publication to funding and often times the unpleasant thought and bitter taste of competing against a scientific juggernaut turn young researchers away.

Tags: big research, Dr. Francis Collins, NIH budget, NIH director, Obama's research policy, young researchers in US

Economy and Your Research: Carpets and Oligos

Do you believe in six-degrees of separation? If you really don’t care how close you are related to Roger Tsien or Bill Gates or the dean of your graduate school, maybe you are still curious about how the economy downturn, oil production, and floor carpet production got to do with you–not just in the sense how the job market is shaping up, but also how your lab research budget and how your DNA oligos are served.

To illustrate how events far and away can influence your daily activities, just use oligos as an example. Starting in 2008 when the oil price was still near its peak (remember paying $4+/gallon?), it became too expensive for carpet producers to continue using petroleum for manufacturing carpets. They switched to some other source or halted business altogether. Side effect was production and supply of Acetonitrile (ACN) dried up. Yes, one of the most commonly used organic solvent is a by-product from making carpets. That, combined with facility shutdowns in Northern China in preparation of the summer Olympics (for clean air) and in Florida by a major hurricane, the price of 4 liters of Acetonitrile changed from ~$40 to about $400 plus lots of begging. This event alone pushed individual customer based (as compared to large scale or prefabricated) oligo businesses like Allele’s to be at a loss.

Eventually the situation changed, price went back to about $90/4L, but not before a long period when Acetonitrile was completely unavailable and alternative solvent had to be used. Long story short, that was some storm to whether! If you didn’t feel it in price or service from Allele Oligo, good, that means we did a fair job shielding the wind and shouldering the pressure from the collapsing roof.

Everything really is connected, sometimes by a few degrees less than you would imagine.

Allele’s mottos: care about the environment, help everybody whenever we can, do the right thing even when nobody is looking, have fun, and contribute to the good of mankind through science and innovation.

Tags: custom oligo, DNA, DNA oligo, economy and biological research, long oligos, oligo, oligo PAGE purification, oligo provider, oligo service, oligo synthesis, oligonucleotide, RNA, San Diego, siRNA HPLC, siRNA synthesis

Allele’s Online Community

Allele Biotech’s participation in social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace has been successful over the past few months! We initiated contact with our customers via these websites not only to provide an easy way to let people know about our newest products and promotions but, most importantly, to ensure better customer service through an easily accessible forum for questions, comments, and yes, even criticisms. We are not like those other companies that are so large that your business and opinions do not matter to us. We at Allele Biotech need and appreciate our customers and reward your patronage and participation in these social networking forums with special promotions and customer service that really lets you know we value your online community membership. Your research goals are our research goals!

Several times a week our tweets will inform you about great deals like FREE SHIPPING on select products ordered within a specific time frame.

Our regular blogs found on all three of our sites are used to converse on a variety of topics from SBIR grants to fluorescent proteins to skin care!

On facebook and myspace you can submit technical questions on protocol or products and receive SAME DAY answers; you may also send comments and suggestions for improvement which will be seen by our head scientist and executives. Your opinion counts at Allele! We began this networking concept as not only a way to better reach our customers but, more importantly, as a way for them to better reach us.

Become a friend, fan, or follower to any one of the sites today and receive a $30 discount off your next order!

Tags: Allele customer service, allele social marketing, allele tweets, Facebook, myspace, research goals, same day troubleshooting, twitter

Meeting with Congresswoman Susan Davis’ Staff on Small Business Grants

Allele Biotech’s CEO Jiwu Wang participated in a meeting between a local biotech business organization “SBIR San Diego” and a representative of local Congresswoman Susan Davis. We had the opportunity to explain our positions on government funding for small business, particularly in the biotech area. We want to see that the SBIR law be extended in its form that is most aligned with its original intention of helping small business innovative research that would not have been otherwise possible.

As one of the participating SBIR members who told each company’s own “story”, Dr. Wang described that Allele Biotech was founded by 5 SBIR grants in 99 when he was still a postdoc at UCSD. Dr. The grants helped the company make its first product and deal by securing patent positions in one of most important research fields in the last decade, RNAi, and out-licensing the rights to Promega. Allele Biotech has since developed its own marketing and sales force, reinvested in formulating viral based RNAi with state-of-the-art fluorescent markers. Allele is currently waiting to start a phase II SBIR project for the NCI on cancer diagnostics.

Coinciding with President Obama’s announcement of federal programs to help small business today, the meeting had an overtone reflecting the general mood about economy’s direction in the nation. Like many research-oriented biotech companies, Allele’s scientists plan to apply for the Stimulus funds through the NIH’s Challenge Grants, in the areas of induced stem cells (iPS) and cancer stem calls (CSCs), which are Allele’s next new product line focus.

Tags: biotech, Challenge Grants, innovative research, NIH grants, San Diego, sba, SBIR, small business, stimulus package, Susan Davis

Effective Use of Resources in Difficult Times

In scientific research, there is a tendency to have everything done in our own lab just so that you can say so, after all, scientific credit is the core criterion researchers are evaluated on. You say wait a minute, don’t we always encourage exchange of materials and COLLABORATION on projects? Sure, but not often enough to make “encouragement” unnecessary. Many “collaborations” are more like sharing of materials with conditions.

In business, collaboration is more in the form of OUTSOURCING or CO-DEVELOPMENT (sometimes through licensing), because doing everything by one’s own employees just doesn’t make much financial sense even for the mega-sized, we-have-everything type of companies. One friend of ours working at a Johnson & Johnson site once told us that a line of research using gene silencing technologies was debated but never moved forward because the lack of confidence in expertise: we are not expert on RNAi, how do we trust our own data? For most biotech and early-stage pharma companies, hiring an expert to do a task brings about too much uncertainty, not to mention cost efficiency.

“Having the expert do it” by outsourcing is somewhat more acceptable to the industry than the academia because the “We are the experts” mentality is more dominant in the latter. Heck, if we don’t believe “We are the experts” in our own field of research, then why do we even do it in the first place? In business though, who is the expert is not something one fights for if the end product or contribution to profit is not made.

The current economic conditions caused many large biotech and pharma companies to lay off thousands upon thousands of employees, in one case of Pfizer layoff, scientist positions were particularly targeted for elimination. Life goes on. Economic downturns are also opportunities for becoming lean and mean, using ways of doing things with much improved efficiency and productivity such as outsourcing, and finding new areas for long term growth.

Tags: assay development, cell culture, co-development, collaboration, molecular biology services, outsourcing, project, protein expression, stem cell development, stem cell reagents, stem cell services, tasks