The Cost of Science

One of the most common questions I get from early biotech founders is somewhat unexpected - it’s the cost to run experiments.

If you’re trying to build a budget or figure out how much to raise, this is actually quite difficult information to get ahold of. Contract Research Organizations (CROs) wont give you the time of day until it’s clear you have the money to pay, and a bottoms-up analysis is both painful and largely inaccurate since CROs are ultimately a marketplace and prices include nefarious variables like reputation.

CRO or in house?

We do almost all of our research with CROs. CROs are great for work that is standard - e.g., running a mouse study, testing blood for certain proteins. They run standard biological assays all day, every day and can execute on them reliably and efficiently. Some CROs can be great for discovery or creative work too, although this can be a lot more hit and miss. You also don’t get as much serendipity - you tell the CRO what data you want, and they give it to you reliably - but superfluous findings are behind many great breakthroughs, an area a CRO is less likely to notice or report. CROs put a significant markup on their work, although it’s still cheaper in most cases than stocking and running your own laboratory.

The best CROs are experienced scientists who leave Big Corp to start their own shop. They’re hard as hell to find (scientists are generally quite bad at marketing) but these shops can in some cases become an extension of your in-house scientific team. The big CROs like Charles River Laboratories are also great and their size means that you can get reliably high quality on basically anything you need. Websites like ScienceExchange are a great place to find CROs; the best is word of mouth and unfortunately, just interviewing a lot of CROs until you find a team that you trust.

As a starting point, here are some studies we’ve run and the approximate cost. We mostly use large CROs like Charles River, with smaller CROs thrown in for e.g. specialty aging studies.

Facilities

Vivarium, 100 mice, shared room - $4,000/month
Bench and desk in a shared lab space - $1,000/month
Technician cost - $150+/hour

Experiments

Testing four compounds in a cell line - $10,000
Cell line gene knockdown, with materials and assays - $45,000
Mouse study, n=15, 6 week drug dosing with assays - $30,000
Mouse study, drug dosing, functional readouts - $130,000
Old mouse lifespan study, with drug, minimal assays - $65,000
Young mouse lifespan study, with drug, functional and biomarker assays - $250,000 - we are doing this one in house - very expensive with a CRO
Large animal, small n, 30d study + assays - $50,000
Large animal, large n, 30d study + assays - $400,000
Target Animal Safety - $400,000 - $1M

Assays

These numbers are at moderate scale - 100-400 samples run. This can become a lot more expensive if you only run a few samples.

Assay development (ELISA) - $30,000
Running the optimized ELISA - $50/each
Clinical chemistry on serum - $50-155/sample - you usually have to pay on top of this to have the data interpreted