How one woman made a ‘tricorder’ that could change medicine [video]
bbc.com
bbc.com
"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...
"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...
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.
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.