TL;DR: The device in question, Gene Radar, is a "tricorder" only in the sense that it's a mobile health diagnostic tool, not in the Star Trek sense of a handheld external scanner that will will give you information about a person or object from a distance without direct physical contact. Based on the video in the article, it still requires a blood sample to be inserted for direct analysis. Really cool, but not quite a Star Trek tricorder just yet.
I was curious about the list of conditions it can detect. I wonder how long it takes, how long between uses, what the maintenance is. When will I be able to walk into Walgreens and get my results?
"enables gold standard real-time diagnosis of any disease with a genetic fingerprint"
Even with the blood sample "shortcoming", it will be huge if it keeps to its promise.
But I learned not to get excited by new medical inventions before a few years pass, before it's FDA approved, before there are enough studies that prove it really does what it says it does, etc.
Cool video. A woman writing some formulas, nano technology, DNA sequences, etc. All cool stuff.
I actually think that is massively cool. In particular for remote areas or for natural disaster response where local hospitals could be unsafe/unavailable.
I will say comparing it to a "tricorder" does the device a disservice. It isn't even trying to be one, it is trying to be something else entirely, and all it will get for being called that is criticism that it isn't tricorder-enough.
"Nanobiosym" is living up to its namesake with the nano-level of technical information provided in their press releases about their "revolutionary" GeneRADAR(R) platform. Plenty of hype, though (from their "Nanobiosym Confidential Video" published on youtube[1]):
"we can actually stop the transmission of HIV to the next generation! ... GeneRADAR(R) will empower you to personalize your healthcare experience by not only detecting but also preventing diseases before you manifest symptoms!
Big claims, Nanobiosym! Tell us more! Reading between the lines, based on your references to PCR, gold standard diagnostics, and "reading and writing DNA at the nanoscale" - just another PCR reference, presumably - it sounds as if you are developing a point-of-care qPCR[2] system that does sample prep in microfluidic cartridges. Wooooooo - there must be more to your platform than that, however, because if low-cost reliable qPCR diagnostics alone could really "stop the transmission of HIV to the next generation" or "prevent diseases before you manifest symptoms," then surely the international public health community, not to mention wealthy western medical systems, would already have deployed qPCR diagnostics on a global scale, compelled by the moral and economic disease-preventing, life-saving benefits you claim.
qPCR really is a powerful technology with the potential to improve healthcare for everyone, everywhere, but incremental technical innovations will not solve the regulatory and clinical hurdles that have thus far prevented it's widespread use.
Personally, I am much more excited about Chai Bio's disruptively-priced Open qPCR machine - open-source hardware, 1/5th the price of the competition at $3.5k per unit, and they just started shipping units [3].
I can't stand it when bombastic, vapid corporate PR gets press like this. DEMO or BUST, Nanobiosym!
Regardless of the corporate claptrap, if we give Nanobiosym the benefit of the doubt and assume their geneRADAR platform does advance the state of the art in qPCR, microfluidics, and point-of-care diagnostics, what might that advance be?
It may have to do with how much blood they need for each multiplex test. Clinical qPCR diagnostics need at least 5-10 uL of blood for each test (ballpark minimum). A finger prick or dried blood sample card [1] may provide enough DNA (human or pathogen depending on the test) for one or two of these tests, but not more. To run 100 or 1000 tests in parallel, a lab would need 5-50 mL of blood. Easy to get from a venous blood draw but not easy in the field.
So perhaps Nanobiosym is developing a reliable method purifying DNA from blood and running multiplex qPCR at nanoscale volumes, and possibly enriching the purified DNA first for particular pathogen DNA sequences with a non-qPCR method. The capability to run hundreds of qPCR-based diagnostic tests in parallel from a single finger prick of blood would result in significant improvements in clinical convenience and reagent cost-savings.
It's an interesting challenge: in a person who is HIV positive but hasn't presented with AIDS, how many viral genomes can be expected to be found on average in a single finger prick of blood (viral titer)? It could be on average only 0.001 - 1 genome [2]
[2] "If a subject has a high HIV viral load (for example, at least 1 ,000 copies/ml plasma), this may indicate treatment failure, i.e. that the virus is replicating and the disease may progress more quickly. If HIV viral load is low (for example, less than 1 ,000 copies/ml plasma), this indicates that the anti-viral treatment regimen is effective, i.e. that the virus may not be actively replicating and the disease may progress more slowly."
- http://www.google.com/patents/WO2014140641A1?cl=en
"Denaturation of double stranded nucleic acids, primer annealing, and precision control over primer extension by polymerase can be accomplished by applying stress to a nucleic acid. These methods can provide one ore more benefits over conventional PCR methods including: precision control over the PCR process; generally improved fidelity; improved accuracy over problematic... [etc etc]"
Am I reading too much into the title? Seems like whenever there's a new thing made by female the titles have to emphasize it, almost like it's out of the ordinary for women to make something. I can't remember titles like "How one man made something..." or "How a team of only men made this..." The accomplishments are impressive regardless of gender!
“He (The Prince) must separate the people. And if the people cling to one another and refuse to part, then you must picture them as if they were in a pit and eventually they will push one of their own to the top to be their leader. And when they do, you must grab their hand and fling them to the mountain top with the villa. And if they refuse the villa you must cut his head off.”
Hmm, it seems to me that it is part of an attempt to get women interested in these fields; along the lines of "Oh there are successful women in this field, you could be just like them".
However, although role models help, I do not believe[0] this is the right way to go. Actively advertising that "X thing/project was made/led by a woman!" implies on some level that it is special event, and unusual. I think perhaps we would have better success with subtle raising of the exposure of women in the industry[1], so instead of explicitly mentioning the gender, have a higher frequency of posts and news articles where women were the lead of projects or of teams that have a majority of women researchers.
In short: I think that increasing the public's perception of how many women there are in a field without drawing attention to it as a special case, would increase the amount of women studying in the field.
At the same time, this is more difficult to implement. So unless a bunch of newspapers collaborate on this, it seems that we are stuck with the former for now.
[0]: I am always willing to be proven incorrect, however :)
[1]: And also with investing more effort into preventing the rejection and pushing away of women who are studying.
18 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 50.9 ms ] thread"enables gold standard real-time diagnosis of any disease with a genetic fingerprint"
But I learned not to get excited by new medical inventions before a few years pass, before it's FDA approved, before there are enough studies that prove it really does what it says it does, etc.
Cool video. A woman writing some formulas, nano technology, DNA sequences, etc. All cool stuff.
Theranos also had some cool stuff to show but...
1: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-12/04/google-draw-b...
rant: I've never liked article titles like these
I will say comparing it to a "tricorder" does the device a disservice. It isn't even trying to be one, it is trying to be something else entirely, and all it will get for being called that is criticism that it isn't tricorder-enough.
"we can actually stop the transmission of HIV to the next generation! ... GeneRADAR(R) will empower you to personalize your healthcare experience by not only detecting but also preventing diseases before you manifest symptoms!
Big claims, Nanobiosym! Tell us more! Reading between the lines, based on your references to PCR, gold standard diagnostics, and "reading and writing DNA at the nanoscale" - just another PCR reference, presumably - it sounds as if you are developing a point-of-care qPCR[2] system that does sample prep in microfluidic cartridges. Wooooooo - there must be more to your platform than that, however, because if low-cost reliable qPCR diagnostics alone could really "stop the transmission of HIV to the next generation" or "prevent diseases before you manifest symptoms," then surely the international public health community, not to mention wealthy western medical systems, would already have deployed qPCR diagnostics on a global scale, compelled by the moral and economic disease-preventing, life-saving benefits you claim.
qPCR really is a powerful technology with the potential to improve healthcare for everyone, everywhere, but incremental technical innovations will not solve the regulatory and clinical hurdles that have thus far prevented it's widespread use.
Personally, I am much more excited about Chai Bio's disruptively-priced Open qPCR machine - open-source hardware, 1/5th the price of the competition at $3.5k per unit, and they just started shipping units [3].
I can't stand it when bombastic, vapid corporate PR gets press like this. DEMO or BUST, Nanobiosym!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFPo4pjT40k
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_polymerase_chain_rea...
[3] https://www.chaibio.com
It may have to do with how much blood they need for each multiplex test. Clinical qPCR diagnostics need at least 5-10 uL of blood for each test (ballpark minimum). A finger prick or dried blood sample card [1] may provide enough DNA (human or pathogen depending on the test) for one or two of these tests, but not more. To run 100 or 1000 tests in parallel, a lab would need 5-50 mL of blood. Easy to get from a venous blood draw but not easy in the field.
So perhaps Nanobiosym is developing a reliable method purifying DNA from blood and running multiplex qPCR at nanoscale volumes, and possibly enriching the purified DNA first for particular pathogen DNA sequences with a non-qPCR method. The capability to run hundreds of qPCR-based diagnostic tests in parallel from a single finger prick of blood would result in significant improvements in clinical convenience and reagent cost-savings.
It's an interesting challenge: in a person who is HIV positive but hasn't presented with AIDS, how many viral genomes can be expected to be found on average in a single finger prick of blood (viral titer)? It could be on average only 0.001 - 1 genome [2]
[1] http://www.spotonsciences.com/dbstechnology/
[2] "If a subject has a high HIV viral load (for example, at least 1 ,000 copies/ml plasma), this may indicate treatment failure, i.e. that the virus is replicating and the disease may progress more quickly. If HIV viral load is low (for example, less than 1 ,000 copies/ml plasma), this indicates that the anti-viral treatment regimen is effective, i.e. that the virus may not be actively replicating and the disease may progress more slowly." - http://www.google.com/patents/WO2014140641A1?cl=en
From a patent granted to Anita Goel / Nanobiosym: https://www.google.com/patents/US7494791
"Denaturation of double stranded nucleic acids, primer annealing, and precision control over primer extension by polymerase can be accomplished by applying stress to a nucleic acid. These methods can provide one ore more benefits over conventional PCR methods including: precision control over the PCR process; generally improved fidelity; improved accuracy over problematic... [etc etc]"
However, although role models help, I do not believe[0] this is the right way to go. Actively advertising that "X thing/project was made/led by a woman!" implies on some level that it is special event, and unusual. I think perhaps we would have better success with subtle raising of the exposure of women in the industry[1], so instead of explicitly mentioning the gender, have a higher frequency of posts and news articles where women were the lead of projects or of teams that have a majority of women researchers.
In short: I think that increasing the public's perception of how many women there are in a field without drawing attention to it as a special case, would increase the amount of women studying in the field.
At the same time, this is more difficult to implement. So unless a bunch of newspapers collaborate on this, it seems that we are stuck with the former for now.
[0]: I am always willing to be proven incorrect, however :)
[1]: And also with investing more effort into preventing the rejection and pushing away of women who are studying.