First off, let me extend a warm welcome to everyone that’s taken an interest in this project. Over the past two months I’ve been extremely busy with the design and testing of the OpenPCR machine and getting a prototype ready to demonstrate at the Maker Faire, so haven’t had the time to blog about it until now.
I wanted to talk a little about why we undertook this project. Building a PCR machine is something that Tito and I first talked about nearly a year and a half ago, but the project only got started in earnest this February, after Tito and I discussed it driving back from the Outlaw Biology symposium in LA. What really made me jump on it was that I had heard from one too many people that this needed to be done, and I certainly thought it was doable, but I hadn’t seen much progress in actually building a thermocycler to date.
There are really two core benefits I see to a machine like OpenPCR. The first is a drastically lower price point. The cheapest commercial unit I’m aware of costs $4000, with other units easily running up to $10,000. There is no reason these machines have to cost so much. While they have to be accurate, the basic technology is quite mature. The high price point has more to do with the traditional biotech market than it does with the complexity of the machine. Academic and industrial labs can afford these high prices, but there is increasing demand from garage biotech companies, labs in developing nations, the DIYbio community, and even high schools for PCR machines, and OpenPCR was designed to serve these new users.
A common objection to this argument is that “thermocyclers can be found on eBay for $100″, so why re-invent the wheel? eBay can be the solution for some people, but it’s far from a solution for everyone. The $100 eBay thermocycler is actually quite elusive, $300 machines are much more common. It can take quite some time to find the better deals. Even then, these machines are commonly sold “as-is”, which frequently means broken. I stopped buying lab equipment from eBay three years ago for this reason. And even if you do get a working machine for $300, it’s an antique unit without modern features such as a heated lid, and the temperature ramp times are often pathetic.
The second core benefit to building OpenPCR was to create a substrate for further hacking. We’d eventually like to add quantitative functionality to OpenPCR, and I know others who would like to develop more automation around it. You have to walk before you can run, so building a working thermocycler gives us all a starting ground for the more ambitious projects to come.