Awesome, thanks for sharing. What is the turnaround time on your in-house sequencing? Is it purely for cost savings that you do it yourself?
Would be keen to hear more about what you are working on. Separately - what is the current state of technology (price, accuracy, accessibility etc.) for synthesizing custom RNA rather than just sequencing it?
Turnaround time is about a day, so as fast as plasmidsaurus would get back to me (I'm also using nanopore, so we're gonna essentially be the same speed, with my library prep taking time but their shipments also taking time). It is mostly cost savings.
I'm working on building a plasmid synthesis company. The price of sequence verified DNA has increased, not decreased, since 2018, even when you account for inflation. On that metric alone, we are regressing in our ability to modify the biological world. I'll be launching in a couple months with a service that costs less than half the incumbent provider, while maintaining their margin. Being able to sequence verify DNA for dirt cheap is a big part of that. Took over a year and a half to get there - it's way harder than it sounds, for a myriad of reasons (things at scale are hard!)
You could mean two things by synthesizing custom RNA - synthesizing oligos (ie, chemical synthesis) or synthesizing mRNA, which is typically from a DNA template (you can have short mRNAs be synthesized as oligos, though). The fundamental problem with oligos is the mutation rates - hence why I sequence verify so much stuff - and you're not really gonna get around that. For other mRNA from a DNA template, well, you need the DNA template in the first place (that's where I come in), and then you usually just transcribe it into RNA using an RNA polymerase. Then, there is essentially an endless rabbit-hole of optimizations for everything under the sun. But fundamentally mRNA only costs the DNA template + polymerase, which you can get for like $75 https://www.neb.com/en-us/products/m0251-t7-rna-polymerase . DNA prices are about $0.09 per base plus $35 right now, I'm aiming for $0.045 per base plus $16.
Would be keen to hear more about what you are working on. Separately - what is the current state of technology (price, accuracy, accessibility etc.) for synthesizing custom RNA rather than just sequencing it?