Element Biosciences Inc., developer of the Element AVITI™ System, a new and disruptive DNA sequencing platform, announced it will implement no price increases to the entire range of AVITI reagents, including the sequencing kit, the Adept™ and Elevate™ kits. This effort to democratize their technology and make it more broadly available and affordable, will take effect immediately for all current and future customers of the AVITI system.
Element Bucks Industry Trends by Committing to Not Increase Price of Reagents
Element has departed from industry norms by setting consistent and disruptive pricing. The current industry standard is to offer different discounts to different customers, leading some customers to pay significantly more for the same product on top of standard annual price increases. This opaque pricing is one source of frustration among the scientific community. Reagent costs are one of the main drivers of a lab’s operational budget and a key reason most customers “batch” samples. To realize the most economical price per gigabyte, labs wait to fully fill a flow cell before sequencing on existing systems. Depending on the sequencing platform used and the throughput of samples coming in, it can sometimes take several weeks to fill a flow cell. This causes inherent delays in the end-user obtaining their results.
“Our zero price increase commitment is core to our mission to enable more science to be done faster and cheaper by the global scientific community. The AVITI system delivers unprecedented data quality and flexibility, now at even better value with added assurance of lifetime affordability,” explains Molly He, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Element Biosciences.
Element Bioscience’s published price for one 300-cycle sequencing kit is $1,680 and the company will keep this price flat for the lifetime of the AVITI system. This will also apply to the 150-cycle kit, priced at $1,080, which will launch by the end of 2022. With current market volatility and inflationary pressures, the efforts announced today will allow researchers to more accurately plan and resource sequencing costs for the future.
“Having been at the bench myself, it is very valuable for a scientist or lab director to have future visibility of their reagent costs, which is a big part of their ongoing operational costs. Keeping prices flat in the highest inflation period of the past 40 years shows our deep commitment to our mission and confidence in our product and innovation roadmap. This is one of many steps Element plans to take in our laser-focused commitment to drive down the cost per genome while leading with the best data quality,” said He.