Cell Culture Outsourcing in Difficult Markets?

During unsettled economic times, drug developers must deal with elevated levels of uncertainty when allocating their precious research resources. As pressure grows to reduce overhead and streamline operations, managers must make hard choices about which tasks are truly core. With manpower limited, or even reduced, how can departments continue to push forward in achieving their research objectives?

Cell culture services is a labor-intensive operation that merits careful evaluation.  Leaders need to ask if their limited personnel should be dedicated to high value activities that lead to new, important, and profitable discoveries; or should their time be spent on lower value, but necessary, work, such as growing cells.

Outsourcing cell culture can offload activities such as growing, harvesting, Mycoplasma testing and more. While outsourcing represents an expense, it is one that can be turned off or on as needed, eliminating the need to carry excess staff to satisfy peak activity periods.

When evaluating an outsourcing strategy, it is important to take a comprehensive look at the internal expense categories and other considerations involved in in-house cell culture operations.  These can include:

Obviously, high quality cells are essential for much of bioscience discovery, but who should be investing most of their time growing cells for experiments and drug screening? Should it be scientists who are focused on delivering high value discoveries? The answer is clearly no. Highly trained researchers’ time and talents should not be expended on labor intensive non-core activities. It makes far more sense to delegate these activities to an organization, such as ABS Bio, that exists to free researchers to do research rather than reagent preparation.

ABS Bio has over three decades of experience and expertise in providing cost-effective custom biological reagents for research, such as ready-to-use cells, cell banks, cell membrane preparations, and a large variety of other services. For example, we offer cell bank cryostorage, cell line ID, DNA and RNA extractions, protein extractions, transfections, cell-sorting, and flow cytometry cell QC and phenotyping.  Our cell culture operation is scaled to be much more efficient that a typical in-house lab can be, resulting in lower cost per batch.

ABS Bio is your long-term lab partner, but ABS is a not a fixed line item on your budget. We are there when you need us, and you are in control of how much we do for you as your needs change. To learn more, please visit our website and contact us.