Many Thanks to Give

We would like to thank our customers for choosing Allele’s products and services. The economic conditions have been challenging for the last two years and are still difficult. Allele Biotech could not have possibly achieved what it has within this time period without the support of its customers.

We thank online readers who visit our Blogs, News and Technical Forum to make our webpage one of the highest ranked among biology reagent suppliers; surpassing Clontech, Stratagene, Promega, IDT, etc. (by online ranking service Alexa’s accounts).

We thank our collaborators (some converted from customers) and business partners (manufacturers, distributors, licensors) for working with Allele and making our plan of one new product per week a reality. Allele Biotech has a very innovative and able research team, but working with researchers outside of the company is always a major part of the R&D effort at Allele.

Allele Biotech is obliged to its employees for their creativity, organization, dedication, and professionalism. The culture that they have nurtured here is to be individually motivated as a basic research group, and to be disciplined and organized as a service provider at the same time.

Allele Biotech is a beneficiary of the US government’s policies on supporting biomedical research and innovation. We appreciate the support for our basic research in the forms of grants and contracts from the NIH and the IRS, and ultimately the American tax payers. It is our duty to create and produce better tools for improving human health.

Thank you once again and have a Happy Holiday!

New Product of the Week 112210-112810:

Photoconvertible FP mClavGR (green-to-red) on lentiviral vector pLICO, email FP@allelebiotech.com for product details.

Promotion of the Wee 112210-112810:

10% additional discount off HPLC siRNA’s promotion price, $135/15 nmol, use promo code FB112210si, order by emailing oligo@allelebiotech.com.

Tags: Clontech, collaboration, collaborators, customer opinions, customer service, IDT DNA, IDT oligo, Life Technologies, mClavGR, photoconvertible FP, promega, Stratagene, thanksgiving

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