Catalog Offers Laboratories One-Of-A-Kind Biologicals

An immunologist who has turned entrepreneur builds a one-man publishing business around a 30,000-item directory It is one of those small yet irksome inconveniences that dog immunologists and those working with biological reagents. No matter how generous one's funding or how proficient one's technicians, there are certain nettlesome tasks that threaten to halt one's research. What to do, for example, when an experiment requires a highly specific monoclonal antibody? If it can't be found in a catalog or in a colleague's laboratory, the scientist might be faced with either dropping the project or devoting months to making the antibody. Enter William Dean Linscott, formerly an immunologist at the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco. In 1980 he dropped out of the laboratory to become sole proprietor of Linscott's Directory of Immunological and Biological Reagents. It's a guide to 30,000 different products, ranging from monoclonal antibodies and hybridomas to scorpion venoms and recombinant DNA kits, all encased in a hard-to-miss hot pink and lime green cover. "It used to be just a nightmare tracking down what I needed," says Linscott, explaining why he switched from being an infectious disease specialist to a small business entrepreneur. "Half the time your antibody ends up not being valid, and you have to junk it and start all over." Linscott's Directory has its share of competition among the growing number of buyer's guides and data banks. Buyers' guides are cheap, appear far more often, and have a vastly broader circulation than Linscott's. While they win points for market saturation, they fall down in their coverage of the products. Their listings of bioreagents, some readers say, are often incomplete and poorly organized. The guides include Biomedical Products, which is mailed gratis 12 times a year to 55,000 selected life-science researchers, nearly seven times Linscott's 8,000 subscribers. There is also the American Lab Buyers' Guide, which goes out free to 75,000 subscribers who also may have their products listed at no charge. But it has been criticized for being too general and for emphasizing equipment. So last fall its publisher, International Scientific Com- munications Inc., came out with its first American Biotechnology Lab Buyers' Guide. The new guide devotes 29 of 126 product pages to an alphabetical listing of chemicals and biologicals, somewhat skimpy in details, that begins with Absorbants and ends with Whole Antiserum. And, unlike Linscott's, it is flush with advertising. The advertisers certainly don't go to buyers' guides to save money. Small biotechnology companies complain that advertising rates in the guides, which begin at $1,300 for a quarter page in Biomedical Products, for example, are prohibitive. One rich and often overlooked source of biologicals is the American Type Culture Collection, in Rockville, Md. The collection lists its 50,000 cell lines, mushroom spores, antibodies, and DNA probes in catalogs as well as through an on-line directory that includes literature citations and a history for each entry. The physical collection to which the listings refer stores a researcher's fruits of labor for no charge. And it passes samples out freely to "qualified investigators," because of a belief that some materials are off-limits to manufacturers who figure profit into their motives. The ATCC's on-line hybridoma data banks, as well as cell culture, human genome material, and the brand-new bacteriology data banks, are more up-to-date than their printed directories. But many scientists are still creatures of an earlier, pre-electronic habit. "It's funny how slowly even scientists become computer literate," despairs microbiologist Robert Stevenson, ATCC's director, who thinks his technology-shy colleagues are missing out on a valuable resource. --D.M. During the past decade he has found plenty of suppliers willing to help relieve that frustration by listing their products in his guide. Though mid-sized biotechnology firms seem to predominate, sprinkled among the roughly 450 suppliers are one-person custom-order antibody shops as well as well-known multinational corporations whose glossy, fat catalogs crammed with thousands of chemicals are familiar to any biochemist. Linscott runs a one-man operation from his office in Mill Valley, Calif. Every two years he mails out a new edition of his directory, followed by three six-month updates. He fills the time in between phoning and writing biotechnology firms and meticulously plugging all the information himself into his IBM XT. He doesn't ask much in return: $50 for one edition, paid in advance, and a buck to have a product listed. The business may not make him rich, he says, but after 22 years in the laboratory, it allows him some time for recreation and trips abroad. He certainly doesn't miss the long days in the laboratory - and he figures that he may be doing more for science now than he was in the university. There are other guides to immunological goods, of course. But Linscott claims that none offers the detail of information that his does. Ninety-two of the 157 pages of products in his book are devoted solely to monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies, with each listing including the antigenic specificity, Ig type, and form. Each listing also provides the names of up to 40 or more suppliers, though as often as not the antibody is available from only one manufacturer or research laboratory. That, Linscott says, is what makes his directory the "best invention since sliced bread." Or at least the best invention since gene splicing. Typically, the reagent a scientist needs for an innovative experiment or a new diagnostic kit is one that, as far as the scientist knows, no other researcher has yet imagined. Linscott's mission is to find - and list - the one company that can help the scientist. For example, one such firm is Jackson Immunoresearch Labs in West Grove, Pa., which has roughly 3,000 products listed. "We sell antibodies with unique twists on selectivity," says the company's founder, William J. Stegeman. He calls Linscott's a "convenience market" to the skyrocketing number of often obscure reagents being produced. Most researchers can probably find what they want just as easily in the better known buyers' guides, says Jack Aronowitz of Technimed Corp. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company sells unique reagents to manufacturers of biomedical diagnostic kits. Other scientists disagree, pointing out that the other guides don't offer as much information about each reagent. However, they complain that, despite the six-month updates, Linscott's is quickly outdated as companies move and products change. Linscott's Directory of Immunological and Biological Reagents 40 Glen Dr. Mill Valley, Calif. 94941 (707) 938-8896 Biomedical Products Gordon Publications 301 Gibraltar Dr., Box 650 Morris Plains, N.J. 07950-0650 (201) 292-5100 American Biotechnology Lab Buyers' Guide International Scientific Communications Inc. 30 Controls Dr., P.O. Box 870 Shelton, Conn. 06484-0870 (203) 926-9300 American Type Culture Collection 12301 Parklawn Dr. Rockville, Md. 20852-1776 (301) 881-2600 Aronowitz, who sells most of his exotic products in bulk to large firms like Abbott Laboratories and Johnson & Johnson, has less interest in "retailing" to the research and university scientists who call with smaller demands. But there are other firms willing to accommodate them; in fact, it is often academics themselves who produce the odd, unwanted antibody, which in the right person's hands can be spun into gold. Such a biochemical straw should be a prime candidate for Linscott's Directory. A university scientist may have the savvy "to sell his monoclonal to someone to subsidize the cost of the faculty, but he's usually not set up to do business in a big way," says Jeff Davidson, marketing manager of the Pennstate Biotechnology Institute. The scientist's lack of business acumen makes Linscott's job a little harder. "We don't keep track of monoclonal antibodies just developed in research labs and that are traded around from one scientist to another," Linscott acknowledges. "It's a real problem." Rushing in to fill the gap is the broker, whose business it is to know which scientist where is producing what antibody and to sell the often obscure reagent, according to Holly Scribner, owner of Biodesign in Kennebunkport, Maine. Scribner, whose brokerage firm sells to the harried manufacturer of biomedical and research supplies, adds that the mark-up can run anywhere from 15 percent to 70 percent. "There are companies large and small who want to produce a kit but don't know how to put the pieces together," says Mike Crowley, a broker for Western State Plasma in Fallbrook, Calif. "I provide the monoclonal and polyclonal blend, I get the controls and the calibrator. Linscott's will tell you where to get the pieces, but it doesn't put the puzzle together." For a lot of small biotechnology companies and university researchers with limited budgets, that's just fine. They're simply happy to have someone tell them where they can find the pieces.

Catalog Offers Laboratories One-Of-A-Kind Biologicals

Apr 15, 1990

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