Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

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Folks, everyone in the world who can get their hands on an illumina sequencer is developing these "30 gene", "400 gene", "N gene" tests, liquid biopsies, blah, blah, blah. Even the fact that they got a VC to shell out $45M is something happen pretty regularly now. Source: senior pathology resident in San Diego, driving past illumina and the Craig Venter Institute every day. Developing these tests is literally all molecular pathologists do. All day long.

The game is to actually get a lot of patients. Memorial Sloan Kettering, Foundation One, Broad Institute, Venter are the biggest data-gatherers I'm aware of right now, with the DoD starting to get in the game. But who really wins will be the platforms that do the bioinformatics analysis: Google Genomics, illumina (basespace), etc.

And the ethics questions and "we don't know about the environment" questions aren't going to get answered until the data is collected. Wait till the EMRs are tied into the big data pipelines. Oh, nellie.

Yep. Academic molecular biolgist here. 100% agree. For as much as this community knows about software it knows shockingly little about the rules of health care.

Hate to break it to everyone breathless over yet another press clipping, but this startup is dead in the water. Another $45M down the tubes.

Are you saying the lack of access to data will be the issue? Or following health laws?

If they get some limited access to data, develop the machine learning software better than anyone, whats stopping one of the big pharma companies from shelling out $1B to acquire the company? Getting access to a tech team + IP could be very valuable. Pharma companies aren't known for their software teams either and this seems to be the core of their business offering here. Not the tests that everyone's already doing... I mean I just reread the article and they aren't claiming this is their core business proposition at all (as the OP seems to imply).

Even Illumina makes $2B in revenue currently. There's lots of money in the pharma industry and they always converge on a few big firms. They don't need to be original to provide real technical value here.

Unlike the pharma industry where you shield your IP with lawyers for 10 yrs, being first means nothing in the software world. It's about who can do it best.

The founders comments here also clarifies that they aren't going after new interesting areas because they are focusing on commercializing something that works right now and advancing that data science aspect of it, instead of making a future play on some original R&D.

Fair enough. Though to prove that their tech is better is definitely a data access issue. I obviously wish them luck but some ex-Twitter employees doesn't sound like a very leveraged team to be better at health data acquisition or data science. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, being good at science requires acquired knowledge. So even starting a bio PhD as one of the guy's did, the strength of their competitors and the carcasses of people before wouldn't give me any confidence to throw any amount of money let alone $45M at this thing.

As someone in the field, this is a refreshingly accurate viewpoint. What do you think are some of the needs in the genomics space that aren't being tackled?

The consent forms for surgery and research need to be for whole genome or even multi-omics sequencing. There a bazillion IRB protocols, and they all have their own consent form, wasting the samples on just 10 or 20 genes.

Which would require getting IRBs on board. Which requires working with IRB systems vendors, like iRIS. (google for "iRIS IRB system")

Also, beating iRIS would be nice.

Also, marrying CROs to investigators and vice versa would be super helpful.

> marrying CROs to investigators and vice versa would be super helpful.

Can you explain this idea in more detail? Many CROs are already establishing preferred-provider relationships with investigators.

I have two friends who are quite senior in local CROs. I assure you, this can be done better.

The Precision Medicine Initiative will be wiring EMR into the pipelines. It'll be worked on by Vanderbilt, Google Genomics and the Broad Institute

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