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

Introducing Product-on-Demand Biological Research Reagents

The general order of operations in the bioreagent industry begins with a developer observing or forecasting a need and developing a product. The supplier then supplies that product to customers by showing that the product will suit their existing needs. An alternative order in our industry is after a new discovery in the form an enzyme reaction mechanism, affinity binding, or biological system is made in lab, someone realizes that discovery could be made into a product. If the idea is picked up by a commercial R&D team, the underlining mechanisms of the discovery are then exploited for particular use and reagents or kits will be built around it. The new products are introduced to the market by convincing potential users that they will make their research better, cheaper, or faster.

From a supplier’s point of view, if the current processes for developing new products have been working, what’s the incentive to change? From a researcher’s point of view, well, do they have any other choices? If something is not commercially available, someone will just make it in the lab if they need it. Some of us still remember the days when a graduate student needed to make his own restriction enzyme because NEB didn’t sell it. However, there is a disconnect between how much new knowledge is being gained every single day in tens of thousands of labs and how small a portion of that knowledge pool is being turned into more powerful tools to make the next round of research easier and more cost-effective. For instance, when an important gene’s promoter is recently defined by a functional study in 293T cells, how soon do you expect to test the signals that influence transcription from that promoter in the primary cells you are working on? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply buy a vector that will express a promoter-driven reporter ready to be introduced into the primary cells in your lab instead of having a graduate student design, construct, learn and try to make a lentiviral vector in the next few months?

And yes, there is the route called custom projects provided by a few bioreagent companies. The prices are often inhibiting for the reasons that the price needs to cover for labor on industry pay scale, materials, indirect, and profit. Additionally, since the service provider does not take ownership of the product, the work of researching the relevant pathways and making construct designs is left to the user.

There is a better way. A company can plan product groups, lines, and packages based solely on the demonstrated importance of a system such as signal pathway or a family of molecules like miRNA. The plan can project to use the most advanced technologies, even accompanied with full product descriptions and vector maps. However, it would be a great waste of money and material if nobody would ever need it, right? One way of dealing with the initial cost is that we make the first kit upon the first order. The customer that places the first order of a new product will get a deep discount off the shelf-product price on what used to be a custom project. They might even have the opportunity to provide input on the product design prior to production. From a supplier side, we will benefit by having an opportunity to initiate a new product without major investment, which in turn would keep our overall prices low for such innovative and advanced products.

This model should help speed up the commercial application of any new biological findings, lower the cost and price of bioreagent products, and encourage interaction between researchers who normally do not work with each other to produce better products for increasing the efficiency of research.

Discount of the week 060110-060710: Any virus packaging project initiated this week gets additional 10% discount that can be used with first time discount and other pricing advantages. http://www.allelebiotech.com/allele3/Services_Lentiviral_Retroviral_Packaging.php

New product of the week 060110-060710: Columns for Miniprep and Gel Purification, ABP-PP-COLM100. If you can make your own buffers or have leftovers from any miniprep or gel purification kits, get these high capacity columns and lower your costs by up to 70%!

Tags: bioreagent, biotech, biotechnology, Clontech, EMS, Invitrogen, kits, Merck, Millipore, NEB, promega, reagents, research field, Roche, Stratagene, tools