July, 2022 | Monthly Newsletter
Good morning from the West Coast. Originally named Quintilis—Latin for "fifth month"—and renamed after the death of Julius Caesar in his honor, July brought heatwaves, more Fed hikes, and another official global health concern declaration from the WHO. Plenty to chew on.
It also brought us closer to a massive, soon-to-be-ready-for-all, collection of protein structure predictions, a first-of-it's-kind commercial personalized cancer cell profile, and stunning images of our universe courtesy of the James Webb space telescope.
Enough said. Let's get to the latest Excedr content. Our July newsletter edition covers:
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Cash runway is the number of months you have until your company runs out of cash. More technically, it refers to the amount of time a company has to operate at a loss, based on their estimated burn rate relative to their cash balance. It is an especially important metric for seed- and early-stage startups.
Perhaps the most important aspect of extending your cash runway is that doing so can be pivotal to keeping the doors open between funding rounds. It is even more important during periods in which the capital markets are going through significant changes. Right now, in 2022, is a prime example of that.?Continue reading.
The status quo of equipment procurement in the life sciences has generally been: buy what you need for the lab with cash or a loan. However, depending on the size, scale, and financial strategy of your lab, you might be wondering whether buying your instruments is actually the best path forward.
Rather than acquire the latest technology using cash reserves or financing (loans, lines of credit, etc.), you can lease the equipment with Excedr instead, conserve working capital, extend cash runway, and avoid tapping into essential cash reserves.?Continue reading.
Working in the life sciences requires specialized lab equipment for R&D, whether it involves drug discovery, manufacturing a medical device, or creating diagnostics. But using working capital or cash reserves to purchase lab equipment might not make sense at the moment.
The instruments powering this industry are generally expensive, which means you’re stuck paying high upfront costs every time you buy a new piece of equipment. Always purchasing with cash can be detrimental to your business financially. Instead, you might consider financing or leasing what your lab needs.
Equipment leasing and equipment financing are two different ways you can acquire new lab equipment, however, there are some differences between the two. Most notably, an equipment loan, which is a type of financing, has different characteristics—meaning it’s structured differently—than an equipment lease. Depending on your current situation, certain characteristics will be more attractive. Continue reading.
According to the?Equipment Leasing and Financing Association (ELFA), almost 8 out of 10 companies in the United States rely on some form of financing to acquire equipment, including equipment loans, lines of credit (LOC), and leases.
Yet despite large amounts of capital being invested through financing in plant, equipment, and software by US companies, there remains a number of misconceptions about how equipment financing and leasing works and how businesses can wield it effectively.
It’s possible you’ve heard of things like hidden fees and rigid terms, factors that make leasing lab equipment sound less than ideal. In some cases, what you’ve heard might be right. However, that’s not always true. More than anything, it depends on the lender or leasing company you’re working with to secure financing, whether it be a loan, LOC, or lease.?Continue reading.
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A sale-leaseback (SLB), also known as a sale-leaseback transaction, sale-and-leaseback, or?leaseback, is well-known for being an effective financial tool used in commercial real estate and real estate investment to reallocate capital. It’s also commonly used in the transportation, construction, and aerospace sectors.?
However, it has its place in equipment financing as well, and is useful in life sciences and biotechnology due to the high costs of analytical lab equipment.
When you enter into a sale-leaseback transaction, or arrangement, you sell lab equipment you recently purchased to a leasing company or lender, get back what you paid for the instrument in full, and then lease that equipment back from the company, paying for it over multiple years through flexible lease payments, rather than paying for it all up front.?Continue reading.
Equipment leasing isn’t widely practiced in biotechnology and the life sciences. In fact, this type of financing has historically been overlooked by scientists and entrepreneurs in the sector.?
In the face of shrinking budgets and tighter capital markets, however, equipment leasing is more easily identified as a solution in an industry that is often highly capital-intensive. It gets you the equipment you need to operate at the highest level and preserves more capital for you to spend on R&D, hire more scientists, purchase essential supplies and consumables, and extend your cash runway during tough economic periods.?
Equipment leasing is a viable option for both early-stage biotech startups and more established labs, making lease accounting just as important. However, this is a topic that can often feel mysterious or confusing, especially because we often have others do it for us.?Continue reading.
As you may have read in our overview on fundraising in the life sciences, there are multiple fundraising options for early-stage companies that still have a significant amount of research and development to do before launching and scaling a product or service.
Grants, a specific type of funding, is provided through both government agencies and non-governmental organizations. When a grant is provided by a government agency, it is considered public funding, or public grant funding, because the agency is publicly funded. When a grant is provided by a non-governmental organization, it is typically considered private funding.?Continue reading.
Antibodies are small protective proteins?produced by our immune system in response to disease or the presence of an antigen. It is also known as immunoglobulin.?In mammals, five isotypes of antibodies are found, which include IgA, IgG, IgD, IgE, and IgM.?
For decades, these molecules have helped biomedical and life science researchers?understand many diseases and develop targeted therapies. In addition, research-grade antibodies are fundamental in the research labs for detection studies.?
The assays that primarily involve the use of antibodies include western blotting, ELISA, and other immunoassays. In some assays, such as western blotting, two types of antibodies—primary and secondary antibodies—are used to detect the target protein with high specificity.?Continue reading.
Antibodies (also known as immunoglobulin) play a crucial role in life science, research, and diagnostic centers to diagnose diseases and develop targeted drugs & treatments for many life-threatening diseases. The molecule has applications in a range of workflows, such as western blotting, ELISA, flow cytometry, and immunological assays.
These applications mainly involve two types of antibodies: Primary and Secondary antibodies.?Primary antibodies are applied before secondary antibodies in any workflow. They bind at a single epitope (to the Fab fragment or domain) of the target protein or antigen. They are of two types: monoclonal antibodies and polyclonal antibodies.?
The secondary antibody is mainly used for labeling purposes. They are added to the surface or membrane, where they bind to the epitope (at the Fc fragment through the Fab domain) of the primary antibody.?Continue reading.