If you think NVIDIA's margins are obscene, you haven't seen anything yet, quite literally. After all, Precigenitics, a biotech company that focuses on live-cell drug discovery, has just inked a $2.3 million deal at a potential margin of over 95 percent!
For the benefit of those who might not be aware, instead of analyzing traditional, static cellular snapshots, or destroying cells during testing, Precigenetics uses a photonic-AI platform - called Cell Cinema - to continuously image and measure the internal chemistry of living human cells in real time, generating roughly 2 to 3 gigabytes of data per cell every two hours .
As for microfluidic environment chips, they house and feed intact human cells under highly controlled conditions while treatments are applied, providing real-time data readouts of human-cell networks via the attached optical hardware.
This brings us to the core of today's topic. Precigenetics has just inked a $2.3 million deal with Thermo Fisher Scientific, selling 11 of its microfluidic environment chips at $200,000 each. The residual $100,000 presumably covers licensing costs.
Do note that microfluidic environment chips are typically not very expensive to fabricate, with a typical chip selling for anywhere between $30 and $80 after factoring in cleanroom time, mold fabrication, plasma bonding, and hours of manual labor. Glass-based chips might go for $500+.
Let's assume that it costs Precigenetics $10,000 to manufacture each microfluidic environment chip. Even this astronomical price entails a margin of 95 percent! Of course, Precigenetics might well justify these sky-high prices by citing the costs associated with the integrated proprietary micro-optics sensors, data pipeline, and amortized R&D.
Even so, we are likely looking at astounding margins, sufficient to make even NVIDIA's Jensen Huang envious. Who knows, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, cellular microbiology might serve as bits for storing and processing data.
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