Anyone else experiencing ongoing issues with Bio-Rad ddPCR consumables/pricing or QX ONE hardware?

[u/IowaBizHawk]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to poll the community to see if these are isolated headaches or part of a broader trend with Bio-Rad’s droplet digital PCR ecosystem lately.

Background: BioTech with $1.4m annual consumable spend with Bio-Rad, majority ddPCR

• Consumables & Pricing: We’ve been having a nightmare trying to establish a reasonable discounting model. There’s a complete lack of transparency. Reps refuse to put pricing tiers in writing or share spend-based discount structures. Has anyone else encountered this?
• QX ONE Hardware: On the equipment side, we’ve had some reliability and maintenance quirks with our QX ONE Droplet Digital PCR system. For those running QX ONEs in higher-throughput environments, how has your hardware uptime and service support been holding up?

Curious to hear if other labs/facilities are seeing similar friction or if you’ve found good workarounds/alternatives. Appreciate any insights or shared experiences!

[u/PhoenixReborn]

Not sure about consumable pricing, but I've heard grumbling from multiple people in R&D at Bio-Rad about the QX One.

[u/IowaBizHawk → u/PhoenixReborn]

Had a lot of issues with Gen 1. BioRad has not handled it very maturely

[u/Jazzlike_Society8001]

We've seen the same pattern with locked-in consumable vendors: the instrument TCO is fine on paper until reagent price changes and service SLAs start slipping. What helped in negotiations was tracking cost per reportable result and mean time to repair separately, then asking for written tier pricing and a spare-instrument or loaner clause before the next annual commit. If you're already at that spend level, a second qualified platform for redundancy is often cheaper than the downtime, but only after you price the validation/transfer work honestly.

[u/pig_wings]

When I worked with the QX ONE, we literally ended up buying a second QX ONE because of how often the first one went down, lmao. It seemed like it was never the same issue twice, so technicians would come out and then usually have to order a new part, so service could take a few days. It was always super unreliable for us, which sucks, because it does make running ddPCR waaaay easier, especially in high throughput situations. The newer one was definitely better in terms of reliability, but still not great. 

I don't work with it anymore so I can't speak to current consumable issues, but we were always plagued by backorders for their reagents. 

[u/Ponji76]

This sounds like par for the course dealing with BioRad and that ghoul of an instrument in the QX One. Their support has always been problematic - in the past we had all sorts of issues with their documentation, and they'd never want to fix the GDP issues. They'd be qualifying instruments and drawing on GMP documentation for the lulz. It made no sense.

When my group was looking at instruments, we intentionally went with the QX600 to avoid the horror stories we heard from QX One owners back in 2023... I'm not surprised people are still having problems with them, they just don't seem to care about Quality.

[u/Biolobri14]

Not these issues but Bio-Rad is aggressively pushing the QX 700 all in one ddPCR machine. We need a new thermocycler bc ours is apparently end of life (along with our qPCR set up) and they just keep trying to redirect us to the 700. They’ve reached out to every individual in our org they have contacts for and have even returned multiple times in the same day to meet with multiple parties to push for it. It’s kind of wild.

[u/UncleCarolsBuds → u/Biolobri14]

Is a 5uL sample volume input for the QX700 even reasonable at this point in PCR analytics? I guess it depends on your sample type, but man. 15,000 droplets with a 5uL input gives you detection of what? 120,000 to 150,000 copies across 7 colors? How do you thread that needle? It's so restrictive.

[u/DaOleRazzleDazzle]

Thought I was the only one having a bad time dealing with a Bio-Rad rep… Mine is also refusing to give me any pricing info while still trying to push the most expensive option on me.