A Look Inside Transcriptic’s (YC W15) New Biotech Testing Facility

techcrunch.com

26 pointssarahbuhr3 comments

Techcrunch has zero understanding of biotech research or how expensive and hard it is, or the current state of the art. ($20k in credits is not going to go very far..)

I like the idea of Transcriptic, but it's relevant only to a very small subset of the kinds of experiments that people do. There have been robots and CROs (and structure-based design, etc, etc, etc.) in biotech for a very long time.

Well, this comment is a big improvement over how it was a few years ago when we first started and everyone thought the whole idea was clearly impossible. We went from being impossible to trivial! Progress!

I didn't say it's trivial.. I think it's a cool model (and much better to be Amazon than all the suckers paying for AWS!), I know it's hard to do well (and expensive), and I don't doubt at all that your software is waaaay better than what Tecan and PerkinElmer et al. provide. The breathlessness of the reporting irks me though..

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