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Comment by predxionbio | Hacker News Reader

Hi, Walker here, one of the PreDxion Bio co-founders. Heres a some more information on the technology underlying the test we are developing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25790830/.

Unfortunately, up until about a month ago us like many folks, were blissfully minding our business developing a rapid point of care cytokine detection platform for use in monitoring patients experiencing certain immune responses following cancer immunothereapies, you can read more here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31597044/.

Currently, we are very much focused on techical/clinical validation. We will have many more details to share on our approach, the technology, as we continue to move things forward.

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I worked at Integrated Plasmonics in 2012–14, the major problem you will face is fluidics and sample handling not so much the sensor design. You should consider stochastic plasmonic features grown using dna self-assembly on the surface of a cmos sensor (lots more recent work on DNA-based plasmonic nanostructures). I worked on varieties of ways to characterize a chemical signal even from stochastically distributed plasmonic features by running calibration during manufacturing. We were able to use support vector regression to characterize known chemical reaction signals on a per sensor basis.

If you have to do that for every sensor the cost goes up a lot. Also, "stochastic plasmonic features" without knowing much more sounds like something that varies by time of day, wind currents in the lab, whether you hit it ten minutes ago with a socket wrench or didn't.

Thanks for engaging with the HN community. I'm a bit disappointed that the original article doesn't say if the author is associated with your company. At one point he says "We", but it's never clear. Did I miss something? Your comment doesn't address this issue at all. Investor? Employee?

Ethics are an important thing.

What do you think of the article's claim that eliminating the cold virus would be a good thing? I think I read somewhere that early exposure to cold viruses reduces the chance of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which makes me wary of trying to eliminate them completely...

There’s a lot of really interesting work left to be done in this area. In our company’s other life we’re involved in CAR-T research, which involves exploiting natural pathways in our immune systems to target them at cancer cells. It’s a super exciting area of research and is bleeding edge in terms of breakthrough therapies coming into the clinic. These therapies[0][1] cure upwards of 90% of what would otherwise be incurable cancers, but they also induce severe inflammatory responses (cytokine storm) which results in respiratory failure and neurological adverse events (that’s a nice clean clinical way of saying putting them in a coma).

The holy grail would be real-time targeted therapeutics to modulate our immune systems up and down in response to various cues. We’re a long way off from that but it’s an idea that’s beginning to get wider acceptance in the medical community. [0] - https://www.novartis.us/sites/www.novartis.us/files/kymriah.... [1] - https://www.gilead.com/-/media/files/pdfs/medicines/oncology...

Don't worry. We're not going to run out of cold viruses any time soon, and the pitch was hyperbolic in virtually every way.

OK, but what are you detecting? Antibodies? Viral proteins? RNA? The messages from Paul and your team have been contradictory. The message is confusing, and this makes people skeptical. It would be great if you could clarify the detection strategy.

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