Why _haven’t_ they already switched? Presumably, these companies are full of people with some vague incentives that point at maximizing efficacy, but they’re leaving a “clearly superior” product on the table. It may be that the answer is that this is some sort of systemic, widespread failure of decision-making, or a decision-making success under different criteria (lower tolerance for the risk of change, perhaps, than these same systems have now) rather than a reflection of some inadequacy of RT-LAMP, but “the folks with the expertise and incentive to get it right are all getting it wrong and leaving money on the table” sounds like a more complex explanation than “there are shortcomings to RT-LAMP that I haven’t considered”, and I’d like to see some further evidence in favor of it.
I think until recent throughput issues PCR was basically good enough and some scientists were attached to their hard learned PCR skills, LAMP was new and scary and unfamiliar enough that lots of scientists just didn’t know it was easier and better. Primer design was a serious obstacle in the early days of LAMP but is easy with modern computer primer design tools.
LAMP is also only better than PCR for the things that it is better at. PCR has general applications to biological science and LAMP is only good for an important subset of possible PCR diagnostic tests. I think mainstream scientists lack the understanding of what LAMP can and can’t do and for something as sensitive as HIV testing I can understand that people don’t want to rock the boat and switch to LAMP from PCR.
It’s also relevant that LAMP is only recently leaving patent protection. I’m not sure what the licensing cost structure used to be but now there are no patent license fees pushing through adoption is simpler:
I am going to try and scale towards selling RT-LAMP kits to US states in very high unit amounts; I’m feeling optimistic.
Why _haven’t_ they already switched? Presumably, these companies are full of people with some vague incentives that point at maximizing efficacy, but they’re leaving a “clearly superior” product on the table. It may be that the answer is that this is some sort of systemic, widespread failure of decision-making, or a decision-making success under different criteria (lower tolerance for the risk of change, perhaps, than these same systems have now) rather than a reflection of some inadequacy of RT-LAMP, but “the folks with the expertise and incentive to get it right are all getting it wrong and leaving money on the table” sounds like a more complex explanation than “there are shortcomings to RT-LAMP that I haven’t considered”, and I’d like to see some further evidence in favor of it.
I think until recent throughput issues PCR was basically good enough and some scientists were attached to their hard learned PCR skills, LAMP was new and scary and unfamiliar enough that lots of scientists just didn’t know it was easier and better. Primer design was a serious obstacle in the early days of LAMP but is easy with modern computer primer design tools.
LAMP is also only better than PCR for the things that it is better at. PCR has general applications to biological science and LAMP is only good for an important subset of possible PCR diagnostic tests. I think mainstream scientists lack the understanding of what LAMP can and can’t do and for something as sensitive as HIV testing I can understand that people don’t want to rock the boat and switch to LAMP from PCR.
It’s also relevant that LAMP is only recently leaving patent protection. I’m not sure what the licensing cost structure used to be but now there are no patent license fees pushing through adoption is simpler:
I am going to try and scale towards selling RT-LAMP kits to US states in very high unit amounts; I’m feeling optimistic.