Monthly Archives: July 2011

Eri Gentry – Open Science Conference (OpenPCR cameo!)

Hi all, I’m not sure what you all are up to on a Friday night. But I’m watching twitter, thinking about OpenPCR, and lo and behold, Eri’s talk from the Open Science Conference (OSCON) flew by. It’s great, and I recommend you check it out, and OpenPCR makes a live appearance. Video below!

Join Eri Gentry, founder of BioCurious, the world’s first “hackerspace for biology” on a journey from garage biology to community lab.

For the first time, serious biological research can be done at home. With the decreasing costs of biotech equipment came a growing community of amateur biologists. The most common name for this group is “DIYbio” (Do-It-Yourself biology), a 2,000 plus group of scientists, students, engineers, artists and entpreneurs, whose interests range from wanting to learn how genetic testing works to wanting to completely overhaul the ivory tower that is scientific research.

Full description at OSCON.com

 

Also, Paul + friends at the Melbourne Hackerspace in Australia are assembling 1 or 2 OpenPCR kits as you read this. Paul mentioned a UStream/Google+ discussion, so stay tuned! Check out Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/search/openpcr) and discuss on the OpenPCR Google Group.

 

 

OpenPCR in the Wild + We need your help!

Around the world!

Hi all, It’s a delight to see OpenPCR on so many desktops! Josh and I spent the past year staring at mostly-disassembled prototypes with wires all over the place. It makes it all worth it to see everyone assembling their kits, posting pictures, and having a blast doing it. At the end of the post there’s several pictures that I thought you would enjoy of OpenPCR around the world!

Here’s a couple examples of what’s going on with OpenPCR 2 weeks after shipping:

  • A high school in Hawaii is testing for genetically modified foods, with plans to upgrade to identifying and tracking non-native species.
  • A college professor in Missouri is booting up her biotech class + gel electrophoresis and has successfully amplified DNA
  • A biotech company in Utah has amplified DNA to successfully test OpenPCR
  • OpenPCR assembled by Singularity University students in Mountainview, California

How you can help

Over the past year we’ve designed, engineered, and shipped our first product. We are now seeking seed funding to take our company to the next level (and build some new awesome stuff). If you know someone who would be interested in investing in OpenPCR, we would love an introduction! Email me (tito@openpcr.org) or send your friends to AngelList (https://angel.co/openpcr).

Also, we’ve raised the price of OpenPCR from $512 to $599. This allows us to get OpenPCR out to distributors around the world — if you’ve got a shop, give us a holler (contact@openpcr.org).

Join the OpenPCR Google group to chat about OpenPCR! We’ve got some great conversations brewing and it would be great to hear from you! https://groups.google.com/group/openpcr

Tito

DNA is now DIY: OpenPCR ships worldwide

OpenPCR PCR machine thermal cyclerHi everyone,

The eagerly awaited OpenPCR kit is now shipping! UPS picked up the first batch of kits and OpenPCRs are on their way to users in 5 continents and 13 countries around the world. For $512, every OpenPCR kit includes all the parts, tools, and beautiful printed instructions – you ONLY need a set of screwdrivers.

A PCR machine is basically a copy machine for DNA. It is essential for most work with DNA, things like exposing fraud at a sushi restaurant, diagnosing diseases including HIV and H1N1, or exploring your own genome. The guy who discovered the PCR process earned a Nobel Prize in 1993, and OpenPCR is now the first open source PCR machine.

The price of a traditional PCR machine is around $3,000. So, do people in garages have great PCR machines? Not really. Howabout high school or middle school teachers? Nope. Howabout smaller medical testing labs or labs in India or China? Nope. Even some big bio labs try their luck on eBay. We set out to change that.

Josh and I prototyped OpenPCR over about 4 months — it was a lot of fun. Last May we unveiled the first OpenPCR prototype to all a bunch of crazy people on Kickstarter, 158 people gave us a total of $12,121. With that we designed and manufactured a repeatable, works-all-the-time device — it took a lot of hard work. Now we’re done and ready to share!

OpenPCR Firsts:

1. First commercially available PCR machine for $512

We get a lot of people who come up to us and say “jumping jillikers, batman! we paid $10,000 for ours and it’s this big (make refrigerator-sized hand motion)!”. While modern PCR machines aren’t fridge sized anymore, we’re proud to say that OpenPCR is the most affordable and most compact PCR machine out there.

2. First Arduino USB storage device:OpenPCR thermal cycler USB Arduino port

This is a big deal for you Arduino hackers out there. A normal Arduino can only talk back and forth over a serial port. This is a pain to set up, and we wanted OpenPCR to just plug-in and go. How does it work? When OpenPCR is plugged in, the Arduino mounts itself as a USB drive called “OpenPCR”. The computer passes love notes to OpenPCR by writing to that file, and Arduino sends love notes back by writing to another file. The implementation was tough, and there are size restrictions due to the size of the chips used by Arduino, but it’s pretty simple to make use of. We also built a cross-platform app for your Mac or PC in Adobe Air so that the we could have a simple computer control interface. Simply plug in your OpenPCR to your computer with USB. No setup besides downloading the OpenPCR app! (Josh and Xia totally pulled off a miracle on this!) If you’ve got questions on this specifically, be sure to post below!

No cutting corners

The clear vision of OpenPCR that made it great was driven by 2 things. First off, Josh is an incredible engineer and we both enjoyed learning a lot of new things over the past year — everything from how to make circuit boards, machine metal parts, laser cutting, Arduino hacking, USB hacking.  I’d say 90% of the success of OpenPCR was lots of hard work. Hard work is great but there are lots of projects where hard work is put in but never “pays off”. How did we stay on course? I think the prototype + showing it off on Kickstarter/Maker Faire had a lot to do with it. We of course had lots of exciting ideas about new functionality and extra things over the past year. The beauty of having built our prototype was we knew if we could just get to that point we would have a hit.

OpenPCR pcr machine guts - thermal cyclerFor example, we designed OpenPCR to be assembled by hand. The printed Build Instructions are a big part of OpenPCR and we did a lot of work to get them right. As we finalized the OpenPCR design a few steps stood out as “hard”. We switched from thermal paste to thermal pads (not messy, no need for gloves), assembled circuit boards (no need for a pro soldering setup), and pre-epoxied the thermistor. The OpenPCR kit is easy to build because of those decisions. We’ve still got to publish the gel pictures showing how great OpenPCR works, but that’s been well tested ourselves. If you’ve got an OpenPCR kit coming your way and would like to post pictures of a gel run afterwards, we would love to see your results too!

The intent of the prototype was simple – we wanted a PCR machine for people like us. That meant a 16 well PCR machine controlled by computer, with a built in screen, good for the lab bench or a workshop/garage. And that’s exactly what OpenPCR is.

Where did the time go?

After Kickstarter started in May, we worked for going on 14 months now. Between Josh and I, I estimate we put about 3,000 hours into OpenPCR, not counting the time leading up to the prototype. We’ve got 57 posts and 600+ comments on the OpenPCR blog, covering a lot of aspects of OpenPCR development. In the past few months we’ve kept our heads down getting everything out the door and we’ve got some stories to share. Short answer is, there’s a lot of blogging to catch up on.

Special thanks to Xia Hong, Eri Gentry, and Will Reinhardt who volunteered lots of their time to help OpenPCR.

OpenPCR PCR machine connected to Mac with Arduino
Just the beginning

OpenPCR is designed for labs, classrooms, and garages. Tell your science-y friends about OpenPCR, “Like” us on Facebook, or write us and tell us that you stopped by! You can also get your own OpenPCR kit!

Do you want to see us develop more breakthrough biotechnology? Along this journey we uncovered a lot of opportunities for PCR and other biological devices. We’re a new company and would love to meet other passionate people. Our hurdles right now are manufacturing (mechanical engineers!), distribution (sales + marketers!), and new hardware (hackers!)/software (hackers!)/bioware (biologists!) + industrial design. If you’re in the Bay Area and want to get in on making all this crazy DNA stuff useful to regular people, send us an email: contact@openpcr.org.

For more information, we’ve gotten a lot of media attention over the past year  including NYTimes, GQ France, Biotechniques, and USA Today.

Ordered a kit and wondering where it is? We have shipped a first batch of kits and emailed out tracking numbers to the recipients. If your kit hasn’t shipped yet, we’re working on shipping a second batch and will keep you updated.

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