Storing and commercialising your reagents – choosing home or away?

Imperial Science Imagery

Safeguarding for the future

Ensuring that the products of your research are accessible in the long-term is difficult. If you move, retire or change your position, how can you be sure that the reagents and tools you created will be available in the future? This is particularly important if you think your reagents may be of interest to other researchers. Deciding how and where to store your reagents, therefore can become a very important decision.

Home or away?

The main choices for reagent storage are either on-campus or an offsite reagent repository. Each can provide you with benefits and challenges:

On-campus

Many researchers store their reagents in freezers on campus. This allows you to easily access and control who can use your reagents, as researchers receive, process and scale reagents in response to any requests received. However, this can also be a very time intensive process, detracting from your valuable research time. It can also be easy to forget which reagents are stored on campus or where exactly they have been stored, particularly if the inventing researcher leaves the university. There is no guarantee that you will be able to move everything to your new university and it’s not always easy to know what will be most important in the future. Reagents are therefore vulnerable to being lost or forgotten about.

Offsite repositories

Using an off-site repository to store your reagents, solves many of the on-campus storage challenges. In addition, having an off-site culture or reagent population, ensures you have a safety net if an accident happens to your reagents on-campus. A repository also carries out thorough and rigorous checks on any reagent that is submitted for storage. This provides peace of mind to you or anyone who wants to use your reagent, as it provides proof that your reagent is what it claims to be (this is of particular relevance if your reagents are cell lines. A challenge with this process, however, is that it can take time to sort, prepare and document your reagents, ready to move them to a repository. A temporary storage solution may therefore be necessary. Choosing the right repository can also be time consuming, particularly if you are not familiar with the options.   

Storing your reagents off-site

Although both alternatives have challenges, the benefits from storing your reagents in a repository far outweigh the challenges. To deposit your reagents at a repository, you need to set up individual agreements with each repository you want to use. This can be a time consuming and complicated process.

We can help

Ximbio already has partnerships with a number of reagent repositories. We help manage and facilitate the storage process for reagents we commercialise. Our expertise within the reagents industry, ensures the commercialisation and storage of your reagents is managed smoothly and effectively. In addition, partnering with us, ensures you have no storage or commercialisation costs to worry about.