Research-group leaders must rethink expenses in the face of inflation.Credit: Getty
As the costs of fuel, groceries and housing surge around the world, scientists are fighting inflation at the bench. Reagents, gloves, pipette tips, microscopes and almost every other item needed to conduct science are more expensive than they were just a year ago. And that means that nearly every researcher is feeling the pressure. “Nobody is immune to this economy,” says Tola Olorunnisola, who leads innovation in lab and clinical services at Avantor, an international science-management company in Radnor, Pennsylvania. In late 2022, Olorunnisola visited labs in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Ireland to help researchers facing a cash crunch find ways to stretch their budgets. “Scientists are becoming more conscious of costs,” she says.
Inflation — driven in part by a fractured supply chain that limits the availability of popular items — has become a major issue for Julien Sage, a cancer researcher and geneticist at Stanford University in California. Last October, he and Alyssa Ray, a research administrator at Stanford, ran an audit of the prices of some of the most commonly used items in Sage’s lab. The price of pipette tips has increased by around 10% since January 2021 and by more than 25% since 2018. Also since 2018, prices of syringe filters have increased by 28%, kits for purifying RNA from cells have increased by 46% and medium-sized nitrile gloves (much in demand at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic) have increased by 91%. Altogether, the Sage lab has seen the price of lab supplies increase by 27% since 2018, and the problem is only picking up speed. “We’ve started to suffer from it more in the last 10 months,” Sage says.
High-end equipment is costing significantly more as well. In 2019, the scientific-instrument firm Cole-Parmer in Vernon Hills, Illinois, sold a Qsonica Q700 touch-screen sonicator — a device that uses ultrasonic vibrations to rupture cells — for US$5,520. By January, the same product was offered for more than $7,130. Sage notes that DNA sequencing kits are one of the few items bucking the trend. In early 2022, each kit cost about 3% less than it did in 2018. But that’s hardly enough to offset the increases of other items.
Tough choices
The increase in lab costs has forced scientists to make some difficult choices, says Jim Woodgett, a cancer researcher at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada. “Scientific budgets are pretty fixed,” he says. “If we pay double for something, it means we’re not buying something else.” Scientists can keep their research projects moving forward, he says, but to avoid overspending on their budgets, they’ll probably need to adjust their buying habits, tweak their experimental designs and take steps to make their labs more efficient.
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Woodgett estimates that 20% of his budget is used for lab supplies, with another 60% going to salaries and 20% to mice. Likewise, Sage estimates that lab supplies historically account for roughly 20% of his overall budget, but he says that the balance is shifting. In the past year, Sage says that he has lost one postdoc and one technician position, but that rising costs of supplies helped erase any potential savings. “We still have the same budget,” he says.
Lívia Guadaim, a spokesperson for LatM Life Science, a consulting company headquartered in Lisbon, says that “market dynamics” have posed a major challenge for scientists. LatM is a sister company of the global lab-supply firm MilliporeSigma in Burlington, Massachusetts. Guadaim declined to provide any specific examples of price increases or to estimate the overall inflation rate for MilliporeSigma products. “We do not disclose details about our pricing policies as we deem them proprietary and competitively sensitive,” she says. She does say that the prices of all products sold by MilliporeSigma are subject to “different levels of impact from things like increasing utility and raw material costs, inflation and logistics”.
Stretched budgets
Inflation has hit almost every part of the scientific enterprise, but funding generally hasn’t kept pace. Sage notes that the amount in dollars of the Outstanding Investigator Award from the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hasn’t changed since the grant was first awarded in 2015. It was $600,000 spread across seven years then, and it’s the same now. “The NCI and the NIH have not paid much attention to inflation,” he says. “That’s clearly going to affect productivity.” But even though prices of lab supplies are rising, researchers are still expected to follow through on the proposed experiments that earned them the grant in the first place, even if those experiments no longer fit within the budget.
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Woodgett notes that the budgets of funding agencies are generally controlled and limited by federal governments. At a time when research trainees around the world are demanding raises to keep pace with the cost of living, more and more of those funds are going to postdocs and PhD students. Woodgett thinks that funders have not prioritized boosting grant amounts to account for inflation. A post on the NIH website in June 2022 by Michael Lauer, the deputy director for extramural research, noted that the average inflation-adjusted value of research-project grants held relatively stable at around $570,000 from fiscal year 2015 to fiscal year 2021.
Without significant boosts in funding to keep pace with inflation, it’s up to scientists to find creative ways to trim costs. One option, Woodgett says, is to rethink experimental design. “You can evaluate the true need or necessity for a particular reagent or amount of reagent,” he says. “Often, we are quite wasteful. If you downsize your assays by half, you can do double the number of samples.” Some researchers might choose to forgo experiments that seem redundant, but Woodgett says that reviewers of papers tend to ask for those experiments anyway.
Unexpected variables
Woodgett says that researchers can always re-evaluate the reagents and kits that they use for experiments and shop around for cheaper options. But bargain hunting comes with risk, even when it involves rodents. “The bedding can impact the behaviour of the animals,” he says. “If you change the feed a tiny amount and you’re doing metabolic studies, it’s very hard to ensure continuity.”
Sage says that it is often possible to cut 10% from a lab-supply budget simply through smart shopping. “Think about your groceries,” he says. “Saving 10% could be the difference between organic blueberries and normal blueberries. It shouldn’t be that hard.” Yet, like Woodgett, he knows he has to be cautious about any switch. “If the whole lab has been using the same kit, am I going to switch to a kit that’s 10% cheaper? It might introduce a variable that I don’t fully understand.”
Budget-conscious researchers can avoid waste by ensuring that they always have the supplies to finish any experiment they start, Woodgett says. With ongoing supply-chain issues and many common items on back order, it takes planning and foresight to see experiments through to the end. After years of just-in-time ordering, Woodgett had to convert part of his lab to storage, especially for pipette tips and other items that seem to run out at the worst possible times.
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Some distributors might offer discounts for bulk orders, which means scientists can save money by joining forces, Woodgett says. “You can get together with other scientists doing similar work in your city, not just your institution, and arrange a contract,” he says. For example, the US lab-supplies firm Fisher Scientific sells a pack of 20 sterile syringes for $21.75, but a case of 12 packs costs $194, a discount of more than 25%. Large orders are also more likely to be prioritized by the lab-supply company, he adds, which increases the chances that the delivery will be made on time. As a bonus, he says, sharing large shipments of reagents will increase consistency between labs and make it easier to compare and replicate results.
Energy is a significant source of lab costs, especially in Europe and even more so in the United Kingdom, where consumer power prices soared by an average of nearly 90% between October 2021 and October 2022. When Olorunnisola works with labs that have to pay their own electric bills, she pays particular attention to anything that draws power, including freezers, fume hoods and mass spectrometers. She says it’s important to ensure that every instrument is properly maintained, calibrated and used efficiently. To make sure that scientists are getting the most out of their freezers, for example, Olorunnisola often installs sensors that can track how often the door is opened. “You can find out if a freezer hasn’t been opened in six months,” she says. In such cases, samples can often be consolidated into other freezers or moved to off-site facilities.
Cost-cutting
Scientists keep a careful eye on experimental protocols, but can be less vigilant of waste and inefficiencies, Olorunnisola says. “A lot of scientists that I talk to say they don’t know where the redundancies are,” she says. A 2020 survey conducted by the publication Chemical and Engineering News on behalf of MilliporeSigma of nearly 1,000 researchers found room for improvement (see go.nature.com/3w5syi1).
Of the respondents, 22% said they still used handwritten records to keep track of chemical inventories. More than one-third (35%) of the lab workers spent at least 10% of their time each month searching for samples or reagents. Nearly one in five said that they lose at least 10% of their inventory each month to spoilage and expirations. But standards can change in hard times. “A lot of equipment and reagents have ‘sell by’ dates that are ridiculous,” Woodgett says. “You can stretch those.”
A 2022 analysis of antibody concentrates that have nominal expiration dates of one or two years after purchase found that antibodies are still usable an average of six years after the supposed expiration date. The report concluded that “selecting antibodies to be discarded should be based on performance rather than expiration date alone” (A. F. Henwood Biotech. Histochem. https://doi.org/jr6h; 2022).
It will probably take more than discounts from lab-supply companies to truly protect scientists from the impact of rising prices, Sage says. Unless something is done on a large scale to either stabilize costs or increase funding, science is likely to suffer. “The major issue is the downward spiral,” he says. “If you have less money, you’re going to have fewer people or be less productive, which means you’re going to have fewer grants, which means you’re going to have fewer people. That’s probably happening to a lot of labs these days, and the question is: when is it going to stop?”
