According to https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1... mass spec machines are between $5000 and $1m, and commercial labs offer services for between $5 and $100 per sample. Presumably the capital investment of buying a mass spec machine and hiring a technician drop the cost per sample drop lower than $5, as it seems businesses are able to stay profitable charging that amount.
According to Wikipedia, the budget for the safe injection site in the article is $1.2m initial investment and $500k/year operating cost to handle 175k injections per year. Even at $5 a sample that’s $875k a year. So mass spec is actually completely plausible, in both capital investment and operating cost, for the budget of a single injection site at the volume that injection site handles. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insite
That the conservative estimates and some upper bounds for gold standard mass spec are within the actual budgets of individual injection sites is, I feel, justification enough for my glib “cheap enough!” quip above. Of course, we may not need the gold standard. For the limited scope of identifying pharmaceutical chemicals in small doses, there may be cheaper processes that function just as effectively.
According to https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1... mass spec machines are between $5000 and $1m, and commercial labs offer services for between $5 and $100 per sample. Presumably the capital investment of buying a mass spec machine and hiring a technician drop the cost per sample drop lower than $5, as it seems businesses are able to stay profitable charging that amount.
According to Wikipedia, the budget for the safe injection site in the article is $1.2m initial investment and $500k/year operating cost to handle 175k injections per year. Even at $5 a sample that’s $875k a year. So mass spec is actually completely plausible, in both capital investment and operating cost, for the budget of a single injection site at the volume that injection site handles. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insite
That the conservative estimates and some upper bounds for gold standard mass spec are within the actual budgets of individual injection sites is, I feel, justification enough for my glib “cheap enough!” quip above. Of course, we may not need the gold standard. For the limited scope of identifying pharmaceutical chemicals in small doses, there may be cheaper processes that function just as effectively.