Our Mission

The Kerafast mission is to advance life science research by facilitating access to reagents from leading laboratories around the world. Rather than manufacturing reagents ourselves, we help investigators at more than 200 academic institutions make available the reagents that were created during the course of their research. Our online platform provides rapid access to these unique reagents, helping remove traditional barriers to transferring biomaterials among scientists. We are also committed to reinvesting back into research by returning a generous portion of every sale to the contributing scientists and their institutions.

This creates a global community of scientists contributing and accessing Reagents for the Greater Good to accelerate their own research as well as scientific progress overall.

Program History

Our unique model was developed by bench scientists in response to three challenges:

• To keep science moving forward, new research materials must continually become widely available to the global research community;
• However, the collegial exchange of new tools among scientists increasingly has been hampered by the mounting complexities and inefficiencies of the Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) process;
• Additionally, the increasing scarcity of government research funding has created a significant growing need for alternative sources of support for laboratory research.

At Kerafast, we developed a program to put rare and unique laboratory materials to work for the benefit of science, specifically the rich bounty of research tools currently stored in the thousands of laboratory freezers lining the halls of academia. These include materials such as antibodies, cell lines, compounds, viral vectors, plasmids, etc., that may be shared via MTAs. With escalating paperwork, delays and costs, the process of MTA exchange is becoming a heavy burden on academic labs that the program at Kerafast can remedy quickly and efficiently.

When providing labs participate in our program, procuring labs in the research community can easily find and purchase the materials online at www.kerafast.com. Kerafast actively markets and promotes these research tools to interested scientists around the world, and when the materials are purchased, we generously split the profits with the providing lab and institution.

Benefits of "Fair Commerce"

Everyone benefits: Perhaps your lab possesses the very thing missing from a distant colleague’s research. Procuring labs gain a streamlined way to learn about and acquire rare and unique materials. MTA paperwork disappears. Procuring labs provide fair payback to support providing labs and their institutions. And perhaps intriguing new doors of collaboration and partnership are opened on all sides.