Oct-2014
McMaster spin-off QReserve hopes to become the eBay of lab equipment
“After Brandon Aubie earned his PhD at McMaster University, he joined the university’s Biointerfaces Institute, which opened in 2013 with $22 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the provincial government and industry partners. ‘We had tons and tons of really cool equipment that we figured everybody would want to use,’ he recalls. ‘But we had a lot of trouble getting people to come in to our facility to use it.’ The reason, he says, is that few people outside of the institute knew the equipment existed.
So, he and some colleagues created a website that listed all the equipment – fluorescence microscopes, spectrometers, centrifuges, and so on – and who to contact if an outside researcher wished to use it. ‘We then thought, why doesn’t this type of system exist elsewhere?’ he says.”
Read the full University Affairs article on QReserve here!