At seed and growth-stage biotech companies, lab purchasing often falls to the people least equipped to handle it: scientists, founders, or stretched-thin operations teams. Too many scientists are stuck managing vendors instead of running experiments. The result is predictable and painful: milestone delays, budget overruns, and researchers pulled away from the work that actually moves science forward.
When the same person who's designing reprogramming payloads is also chasing down backordered tips, something is fundamentally broken.
Last week, we hosted a live panel with lab operations leaders from NewLimit, Site Tx, and Nanotein Technologies who solved this exact problem with Science Exchange Virtual Lab Manager™. What emerged wasn't a sales pitch. It was a candid conversation about the breaking points, the business case, and the implementation realities of bringing in virtual procurement support.
If your scientists are spending more time wrestling with suppliers than actually doing research, here's what you need to know.
When the same person designing reprogramming payloads is also chasing down backordered tips, something is fundamentally broken in your lab ops.Every company on the panel hit a similar wall, just at different stages of growth.
For Megan McMaster, Senior Lab Operations Manager at NewLimit, the issue was volume and complexity. NewLimit is building AI-accelerated reprogramming medicines, work that demands intense focus on designing transcription factor sets and running cellular experiments.
Megan described what she walked into:
"There had been a pretty significant gap when the previous lab manager had left. I came into a little bit of a cluster and was trying to get a handle on that as well as do every day-to-day things to keep everything running. I essentially was the operations team for a very long time. It got to the point that my mental well-being was struggling, and I wasn't knocking off as many things on my task list as I needed to."
The operational reality was stark: multi-million-dollar R&D programs were being coordinated through shared spreadsheets and forwarded email confirmations.
Tina Huynh, Associate Director of Laboratory and Facilities Operations at Site Tx, faced a different manifestation of the same problem. Her team was juggling multiple suppliers across different research programs, with no centralized system for tracking orders, managing compliance, or ensuring budget adherence. Every new supplier meant starting from scratch with contracts, compliance verification, and system setup.
"I've worked with Ian, my VLM, for eight years now," Tina explained. "When I had that two month gap without Ian, I just completely freaked out a little bit. On top of tracking the orders and placing the orders, Ian's like my partner in crime. We talk daily about all of the orders being placed, when they're coming in, what the alternatives are."
At Nanotein Technologies, Jenna Doe confronted the founder's dilemma that many early-stage biotech teams face. Scientist-founders were simultaneously purchasing, coordinating, and setting up equipment on top of their actual research responsibilities. With tight budgets and aggressive R&D goals, adding headcount wasn't the answer. But the status quo was unsustainable.
"They never knew where their things were," Jenna recalled. "If they struggled to get a hold of a customer service rep, they would just hang up the phone and not deal with it. They would go four weeks without getting the thing they really needed. It was incredibly cumbersome to try to emotionally support these people that were struggling to do their day jobs with this extra piece attached."
The common thread? Purchasing had become a tax on discovery. Scientists weren't making breakthroughs; they were chasing purchase orders.
Here's where the conversation got specific.
Hiring a full-time procurement specialist for a biotech company typically costs $80,000 to $120,000 annually when you factor in salary, benefits, and onboarding time. That person needs training on your science, your suppliers, and your compliance requirements. If they leave, you start over.
Virtual Lab Manager operates on a different model. The service includes vendor communication, tracking arrival times, resolving urgent orders and returns, submitting purchase orders, and managing invoices—essentially the full job description you'd otherwise need to hire in-house. But you get dedicated procurement support tailored to life sciences R&D, backed by a platform that already connects you to 3,800+ pre-qualified suppliers under a single master agreement.
| Aspect | Virtual Lab Manager | Full-Time Procurement Hire |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Vendor comms, POs, tracking, invoices, urgent orders | Vendor management, contracts, internal processes |
| Cost Structure | Service fee, adjustable with lab growth | Fixed salary plus benefits and overhead |
| Time to Value | Onboarded using standard lab-ops playbook | Months to hire, ramp, and document processes |
The panelists were direct about the cost comparison. Jenna explained the decision-making process:
"When I onboard with a virtual lab manager, maybe you're kicking your lab off, the first thing they're gonna do is go to all the primary vendors that have the best deals. They're going to work with you to see, are you signed up with CLS or BioComp? You're gonna find all those percentages that stack up and add up to get you the best deals."
For Site Tx, it was about efficiency. Tina's team could offload the administrative burden of supplier sourcing and onboarding while maintaining control over vendor selection and compliance. They gained the function of a procurement team without expanding the organizational chart.
Tom Ruginis, who hosted the panel, contextualized the financial impact:
"The cost per scientist, the consumable cost per scientist—when you apply for an NIH grant, that is somewhere around two to $3,000 a month. In startup land that is somewhere around four to five K a month. It's a lot of money per head. Staying on top of that stuff is critical."
The numbers told the story, but the operational reality made it tangible.
Tina shared her most significant pain point:
"One of the pain points that VLM has really helped me with is tracking orders. Putting in orders and tracking orders for your team is just something that I don't even think about anymore since the VLM took over that role. When I didn't have a VLM for only two months, it was probably one of the hardest things for me to do, just staying on top of placing orders and also keeping track of when those orders were coming in for the team. There's a lot of deadlines that come for a lot of the teams working in science. So knowing when your things are coming in is really important."
For equipment purchasing, the savings were substantial. Tina explained:
"I was just looking at our savings from 2025 and what we budgeted versus the actual purchase price. We saved about half a million dollars on equipment by sourcing just used equipment and shopping around. I do think that there's a lot of benefit having a VLM shop around with different vendors and suppliers that they've all worked with in their time as a VLM to figure out who's the best person to purchase from with the price points that they're selling at."
Megan's experience echoed this:
"When I first started at New Limit, one of the first things I did was go through thousands and thousands of invoices and seeing where our money was going and met with so many vendors, which is just incredibly time consuming and emotionally draining. This year, having that VLM and being able to go through and look at what pricing contracts we had was incredible. As we've expanded our team quite a bit this year, being able to work with our VLM and send a list of equipment and have them just check off all these boxes saved me so much time and emotional pain and trauma, and I am eternally grateful."
For a company like NewLimit, where AI-accelerated discovery means testing more transcription factor sets and building better cellular reprogramming models, every hour shifted from spreadsheets to experiments compounds into faster discovery cycles.
The less quantifiable but equally important shift? Scientists' day-to-day work changed. Researchers stopped being interrupted by vendor follow-ups, contract questions, and invoice reconciliation. They started focusing on experiments again.
Scientists shouldn't be procurement managers. Founders shouldn't be chasing invoices. Operations teams shouldn't be reinventing supplier onboarding for every vendor.One of the most practical segments of the webinar focused on planning ahead.
All three panelists emphasized the importance of forecasting purchasing needs as part of annual budget planning. For biotech companies, Q4 is when you're locking in next year's R&D roadmap and the associated costs. Waiting until January to figure out your procurement strategy means starting the year behind.
Virtual Lab Manager support includes running recurring processes and ensuring the lab's accounting team has the right documentation for each order. By Q4, teams reported having draft 2026 purchasing plans based on actual usage patterns rather than guesswork.
Jenna explained the planning benefits:
"Having that intermediary to be able to drive some of those budgetary conversations and to get the best pricing where you can sort of put your hands up and say, I know this group is supporting my team in a way that I am gonna get the best cost on things and I'm gonna be able to monitor this budget really clearly. I think that's incredibly helpful."
She stressed the strategic importance:
"Ensuring folks are following a budget, ensuring folks are following the authorization channels—especially when an organization in the good times of having money in the bank, people wanna buy, they wanna get the new thing, they wanna build their inventory. Having a VLM to support those compliance pieces and making sure that the leaders in the organization understand the spend and understand what the ask is from the scientist, I think is really helpful."
The panel didn't shy away from the challenges.
Megan was candid about the internal change management required. Scientists who were used to managing their own vendor relationships had to adjust to a new workflow. Lab personnel had to route orders through the VLM rather than placing ad-hoc orders themselves. The shift from decentralized to centralized ordering required getting everyone to stop placing orders independently and instead route requests through a single, visible channel.
The key was demonstrating value quickly so adoption became natural rather than mandated. There's real onboarding work: contract review, aligning expectations, and initial data cleanup. Implementation requires dedicated time upfront. There's no magic wand for messy spreadsheets and half-documented processes.
Jenna emphasized the scalability approach:
"When I joined Nanotein Technologies, a small four to six person operation selling products into the cell therapy space, we had two to four scientists that were purchasing on their own. Tom and I worked together to get something really lightweight just for our team to be able to do purchasing through a VLM on a very small scale for money that we could afford for even just a couple of months to see how it felt."
She contrasted this with her experience at a larger company: "Going from that huge supported system to literally nothing on a small team was really challenging. You needed to bring a VLM back in to support them."
Tom added important context about the broader landscape:
"The value of a virtual lab manager is higher, and the need is higher, just 'cause the suppliers stink at their job in a lot of situations. They're hard to negotiate with. Customer service can't help, there's too many middlemen, there's a drop shipper and a second shipping company. The customer service agent can't get to the person that they need to get to, to help you."
The consensus advice: expect a learning curve, but plan for it. Implementation isn't instant magic; it's a structured process that pays dividends once it's in place. And even after implementation, vendors still backorder and shipments still get delayed. The difference is that someone whose job it is handles the fallout rather than pulling scientists away from experiments.
If any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
Ask yourself:
Lab purchasing at early-stage biotech companies is broken not because people aren't trying hard enough, but because the tools and infrastructure haven't kept pace with the complexity of modern R&D. Scientists shouldn't be procurement managers. Founders shouldn't be chasing invoices. Operations teams shouldn't be reinventing supplier onboarding processes for every new vendor.
The companies on this panel solved the problem by recognizing that procurement infrastructure is as essential as lab equipment. They invested in systems that scaled with their science rather than slowing it down.
As Megan put it directly:
"Do you sleep better when you have a virtual lab manager available to you? Oh my gosh, yes. Just knowing the orders, knowing that they're gonna get pushed through, if there's a credit application, it's gonna go through, I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about anything on that front. That's incredibly relieving."
Jenna added another dimension:
"Just knowing you're not doing it alone. Sometimes you get asked to do something and you're like, I've not figured this out before. You call the VLM and you chat it out and you say, what resources do you have at your disposal to help me? Just knowing that you have somebody that you can talk to about what you're trying to do is incredibly helpful and validating and just a really great resource."
Tom closed the webinar with this reminder:
"My goal has always been making scientists happier by providing resources to the people supporting the scientists. If we do that, science will be better, more innovations, more breakthroughs, and humanity benefits."
If you want to hear directly from teams at NewLimit, Site Tx, and Nanotein about what changed in their labs, watch the on-demand webinar for the complete conversation.
Or, if you want to sanity-check the business case for your own lab—what you'd save versus hiring, how quickly you can offload ordering, and what implementation really looks like—schedule a short working session with the Virtual Lab Manager team.
Your scientists are waiting. The question is: for what?