One of the key values Perlara was founded on is transparency, and a commitment to open business practices. To that end, and to help other entrepreneurs get an idea of what it’s like to launch and run a biotech start-up, we’ve been posting regular updates about our spending and resource allocation. In keeping with our mission, it’s time to check in for our quarterly open business review. This post provides high-level insights into our 2018 Q1 burn rate.
Let’s start with the bad news: We were minus $662,000 for the quarter. But this is down from almost $800,000 in the previous quarter. We are trending in the right direction, however, because we had more PerlQuest revenue in Q1 than in the past 4 years!
Which brings us to the good news: We launched three new PerlQuests in Q1- Multiple Sulfatase Deficiency, Undiagnosed Diseases Network (Coffin-Lowry Syndrome and GNAO1) – and have a total of five PerlQuest partners. We made $230,000 in revenue. Our monthly burn is around $260,000 per month, so we extended our runway by about one month. Our revenue goal for Q2 is $500,000.
Now let’s break down our spending
As in previous quarters, our largest expense is payroll. Customer Development includes marketing consultants, website revamp, conferences and travel. Business Support includes most of our consultants who help us run the business, and lawyers. Office includes rent, utilities, janitorial and building maintenance.
Our Lab Operations is broken down into four teams: Fly, Worm, Yeast, and Cells. Common refers to supplies or equipment shared by all teams such as gloves, pipette tips and most of our capital equipment, such as the Echo550.
Team-independent view of lab spending
In 2018 we made the decision to cut back on our legal expenses, saving about $8,000 per month, which we used to hire another employee. Looking ahead, we plan on putting more money into Lab Software Development to automate some of our processes, and currently have RFP’s out for hardware and software automation.
Stay tuned for future updates! In the meantime, if you’re new to The Ark, our blog, and interested in start-ups, read some of our previous posts on the subject.
