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Comment by dannykwells | Hacker News Reader

Not even in trials yet. GRAIL is running a 100K person trial, to read out next year. Also, not one paper showing this kind of prediction in the clinic, which GRAIL, freenome, Guardant etc all have.

No meaningful papers published + huge claims +single drop of blood = TheranosII

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Don't confuse a US-centric view of medical technology development, western medical journals, US trials etc with something developed in Japan. This is Toshiba, working with the (Japanese) National Cancer Center Research Institute and you can be sure there's extensive research behind it, even if it's in Japanese.

Can you please post links to the research that you mention?

"Planned for details of the technology will be announced at the "42nd Japan Annual Meeting of the Molecular Biology Society[5]" to be held in Fukuoka on December 3 to 8 days."[0][1]

[0] https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1220546.html

The overview can be read in the following links: (all in japanese):

Toshiba announcement[1], National Cancer Center Japan[2][3], Nedo[4]

[1] https://www.toshiba.co.jp/rdc/detail/1911_06.htm

[2] https://www.ncc.go.jp/jp/information/pr_release/2014/0613/in...

[3] https://www.ncc.go.jp/jp/information/pr_release/2014/0613/pr...

[4] https://www.nedo.go.jp/news/press/AA5_100275.html

[5] https://www2.aeplan.co.jp/mbsj2019/

Also, here's the information regarding the project's funding and about the objective: https://research-er.jp/projects/view/920250 and https://www.nedo.go.jp/activities/ZZJP_100082.html

Thanks. None of these are peer-reviewed articles or scientific conference presentations (although it will be great to see what comes out of the meeting).

The original poster was pointing out that this is, so far, vaporware because Toshiba has not presented any actual scientific results, unlike Grail, Guardiant and others. Everything seen on this so far is just marketing (all of the scientific literature links on Toshiba's website are to cancer epidemiology surveys, not articles about this technology). The parent poster has yet to back up their assertion that there is "extensive research" behind it. I've been unable to find any publications or patent applications on this, so I'm very interested if someone has links.

This is part of the damage Theranos has done. Even when a legitimate advance comes along in the same field, people are reluctant to believe it because of the hype that Theranos created.

Not exactly. What Theranos has done is to make clear in its aftermath why the problem of making a diagnosis from a single drop of blood is difficult. In short, the sample size is too small and may not contain biomarkers of the diseases of interest even if they are present in the body. Unless this advancement in its application can show how and why this is not a problem, there will be resistance towards accepting what is being put out without further substantiating evidence.

Jokes aside, my understanding is that diagnosing diseases using a drop of blood was once a promising and legitimate application of microfluidic & lab-on-a-chip technology and many believed it was the future. The problem of Theranos was that the company was being completely delusional about its serious limitations, and now everything that involves "a drop of blood" has a bad name afterwards.

Is there anyone who work in the related area of research? Could you give us an overview of the actual progress of the technology today? What can the technology do today? And what is the limitations?

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