I am in the lab really late tonight, and finished everything except waiting on my MTTs to be done, so I was just doing some website searching for a few products I need for my upcoming experiments, and I came across an interesting marketing spiel.
During my PhD when I needed a lot of rapamycin for my animal studies, I found this company called LC Labs, as a result of having to shop around, and overall I think they’re pretty cool – they don’t waste money on extravagant marketing/trade shows/brightly colored catalogs/sales reps etc to keep prices low. When I figured out how much rapamycin I would need for even the first 2 months of the study (and I had hoped it would last even longer if the mTOR pathway was important!), it would be $40K. Yikes! Even though my lab in grad school was very well-funded and we never worried about money, this figure was a bit shocking, so my PI asked us to look around….LC Labs to the rescue….just as an idea 1mg at Sigma is around $279, whereas LC Labs equally pure product is $225 for 500mg!….They have a handy-dandy chart on every product page with their competitors prices based on mass and purity claim which I like again, as it demonstrates transparency.
So even now I continue to check them out for drugs/reagents that I can’t just get for free from the pharmacy here. On the staurosporine page tonight I read this funny statement that caught my eye:
“Buy 100-300 mg from LC Labs; support a postdoc for 1-2 years with the money you save!”
LOL, but really??? Lets see, if I needed a boatload of it (since it [staurosporine] inhibits many kinases at very low nanomolar doses) and wanted to order 300mg it would cost $1590 from LC Labs. Most of their competitors don’t sell such a large size, but biorbyt does, and they charge $2245 for the same 300mg (according to the price table)….a $655 difference. Where can I find a postdoc for $655/year or even $655/month? (I’m taking notes for my future lab
