Cost Analysis

The ultimate goal of our iGEM project is to assist developing countries where acquiring proper nutrition is a major difficulty. Not only is there not enough food in these countries, but also the food available is not nutritionally sufficient. Malnutrition is so out of control that it indirectly causes about half of the deaths of young children in developing countries.[1] People not only have difficulty providing nutrition for themselves but also for their livestock, which only furthers their own malnutrition. The plan is to increase the nutrition first for the livestock, which will in turn increase the nutrition for the people. The additional energy given to the livestock from the breakdown of cellulose would mean that the livestock would not only require less food, but would grow larger and have more meat.

In order for this plan to be cost effective, the administration of the probiotic, in this case pills, must cost less than the difference between the food required to sustain the cow and the additional nutrition gained by the cow. To calculate a rough estimate of the pill costs we performed some dimensional analyses using a few facts found online. We found that it costs approximately 1-2 cents per empty pill capsule [2] and it costs roughly $100 for 1kg of LB broth to grow the probiotic cells. According to Sigma-Aldrich, 25 grams of LB makes 1 liter of LB broth. There are roughly 2.5E7 bacterial cells per mL of broth [3] and there are roughly 1.5E10 bacteria per pill (most pills seen online were between 10 and 20 billion cells). Using dimensional analysis, this equals about $1.50 per pill. While this figure does not include labor and preservatives which increase the life-span of bacteria within a pill, it also does not include the drastic decrease in price for buying all these derivatives of the pill in bulk. Ideally the extra energy and nutritional value gained from this pill would outweigh the cost of the pill. In order to be sure of this, we would need to perform tests with our product which look at how long it lasts in an animals gut and exactly how efficient it is at increasing the energy gained from the breakdown of cellulose.

The best comparison tool we found was the industry which involves feeding growth hormones to cows. This is similar to our product in that money is spent to increase the size of cattle. However we believe our product would be less harmful because it would not chemically alter the hormones of the cow, but rather assist the cow to break down its food, allowing the cow to receive more nutrients from the same amount of food. In the United States, cattle farmers pay a fee once a year to feed their livestock this growth hormone, and from this hormone they make a 40-fold profit over their initial expense.[4] If our product is found to be even fractionally as successful as this, it would be worth implementing to help feed those in developing countries.