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Comment by Agingcoder | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how cheap culturing bacteria is ( I really have no idea )?

At 1 million/year ( worst case ), that’s roughly 3k/day so 40 dollars / analysis using your numbers . Assuming the machine lasts a bit longer ( say 5 years ) that’s 8 dollars/analysis, assuming 20min/sample. Make it a bit faster (5 minutes) and you’re down to two dollars which doesn’t look super expensive to me.

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I would also wonder whether cultures are compatible with mass spec, and what the bottleneck is on measurement.

Culturing for optical microscopy seems like you need 1-10 DAYS before you get enough of a colony going to identify things, assuming you can successfully culture them at all. What if you plopped your culture down on the fermenter and gave it three hours (very cheap! Parallelizable!), then threw it in the mass spec? Would that shorten mass spec measurement time?

That’s assuming the machine works 24/7 matching marching perfectly the demand. I’m not a doctor but I guess it’s a seasonal "business" with more demand when cold winter starts, back to school September, epidemic episodes…

Aren't there are also operating cost ? What you said is just depreciating cost of the machine.

Indeed. Let’s add electricity and maybe double the costs ? Note some of the costs will be shared anyway with the bacteria culture anyway ( you need folks to interpret the results, real estate , etc ). Still at 4 usd/ analysis, it looks reasonable to me.

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