Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about the company that's being touted in this post so I did a little searching. The website doesn't seem to have much on it.

I guess it's a YC17 company. The founders are Caroline Landau, Tim Cornell, Walker McHugh. From 2016: Landau was an MBA candidate, the other two founders have biomedical research/medical backgrounds: Walker McHugh, Co-Founder, PreDxion Bio / Biomedical engineering candidate, University of Michigan Dr. Tim Cornell, Co-Founder, PreDxion Bio / Pediatric Critical Care Physician, University of Michigan (https://www.hbs.edu/openforum/openforum.hbs.org/goto/challen...)

At least until recently, the company focused on making diagnostics for immune disorders (microkine) for CAR-T patients which I can't find much detail on. I don't know if it's related to the SPR-based tests mentioned in the pb post.

They received a government business grant (SBIR) in 2018 and have some VC funding.

It looks like this post demonstrates their pivot to a specific infectious disease, and from a hospital provider setting to a public setting.

As an ex-advisor to a successful (in bio) VC fund, this is not something I would really spend a lot of time considering. There are too many non-technical hurdles that would need to be jumped before this was widespread, popular, effective, and profitable.

Hi, Walker here, one of the PreDxion co-founders. Up until recently we've been focused on developing our technogy as a point of care biosensor for us in patients experiencing dysfunctional immune responses (e.g., sepsis, ARDS, and the immune responses induced by certain cancer immumotherapies).

The technical implementation of a viral detection assay is much simiplier to implement than our quantitative, multiplexed small MW biomarker sensors... But there are certainly many other hurdles that remain as you point out as well as the additional biological uncertainty that remind around SARS-CoV-2 it's infectious course as well as our bodies subsequent immune responses.

There are certainly many hurdles left to be tackled but that's exactly what we're working towards.

What TRL are you at for the original POC test, and what TRL are you at for viral detection? Any published papers for viral detection?

Are TRLs usually used outside of government R&D related things? If they got an SBIR I guess they'd be familiar with the technology, but I'm only familiar with it because of DoD funding applications and stuff, it's not terminology I've seen used in the private sector too much. Maybe it is, I'm curious to know if that's the case. I've usually only heard stages of tech development discussed in terms of preclinical, clinical stage, and other regulatory frameworks rather than tech readiness level necessarily.

Agreed. TRL (tech readiness level) isn't something commonly used outside government.

I’ve seen TRLs used in tech transfer offices and engineering departments in academia; NIH and NSF (usually associated with SBIR programs) as well as the DoE; in medical device and pharma manufacturing; and in life science VC groups. In private companies and VCs I’ve heard it used most in management and BD contexts. I think TRLs can provide a useful second axis to the more common clinical or regulatory development staging.

It’s critical to not underestimate the non-technical steps here, in terms of how do you deploy at scale, convince venues to install, deal with throughput rates, tie results to individuals, etc. All solvable, but it’s important to think about those sooner rather than later. I have some experience on the security side here and how to deploy technologies like this at scale... happy to help (my email is in bio).

Yup, lets look at the actual and physical supply chain of “at scale” to be tackled to succeed.

And i am wishing them success, and my brother is the director of the VA for the entire state of Alaska, an Airforce Colonel (commander, tenth medical wing) and ive personally built/designed/commissioned 10+ hospitals (el camino, sf general, sequoia, nome, and more)

((All on the tech implementation and design side))

Anything i could contribute i would.

(My creds can be freely confirmed)

Right, I think we’ve probably missed boat on developing new diagnostic methods for Sars-CoV2.

In particular, this method appears to be antibody based? (Which has accuracy issues) and uses SPR, which may involve some technical risk.

However, I think there’s mileage in developing methods now for the next pandemic. My personal interest is in developing programmable qPCR-like systems [1]. So that kits can be deployed ahead of time, and then programmed to a specific target as required. If anyone is interested in discussing diagnostic approaches, please get in touch.

[1] http://41j.com/blog/2020/03/thoughts-on-a-new-approach-to-vi...

I'm not familiar with the acronym PSM. Can you expand?

Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Chui at UCSF? His group has done some really cool work using mNGS to detect/diagnose emerging/rare infections in critically-ill patients with refractory encephalopathy

Sorry, typo. I meant SPR (surface plasmon resonance).

I’ve worked at a number of NGS platform companies developing new sequencing approaches. The problem is that sequencing is still expensive at the per-run level. It’s possible to be cost competitive with qPCR if you multiplex samples. But this isn’t ideal.

It would be interesting to create a small/cheap sequencer which could be applied to point-of-care/at-home testing. However, most of the money has gone after attacking the market leader (Illumina) on a cost-per-base, rather than cost-per-run.

A 1USD per-run sequencer would be interesting. But I’ve not seen anything that will hit that target in development. If anyone reading this is developing such a system, let me know, I’d love to get involved.

The idea of a programmable qPCR system is to add some of the versatility of sequencing to qPCR.

We've developed something NGS-based we call SwabSeq. You can find out more here: https://www.notion.so/Octant-SwabSeq-Testing-9eb80e793d7e463...

You can get to $1/sample; but need >1000 samples/run at least to get to that cost level. Could run 10k/day without automation; likely a lot more (100k-1MM) with automation.

Oh, nvmd. I just saw you wanted a $1/run. Something ONT based perhaps.

Wouldn't many of the non-technical hurdles be reduced in the current situation? FDA approval steps for example have been relaxed for potential treatments. It's not my area, but I'm just curious what makes it so impossible or unlikely.

Hi,

I would love to hear about your advisor role experiences with VC funds. Would you be up for a short chat/call? My email can be found in my profile.

Background: Chemistry/Startups, looking what to do next with my life.

Cheers!

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