Bikanta’s (YC S14) Tiny Diamonds Find Cancer Before It Spreads

The false positive paradox is often used when answering the question, "why not test everyone for everything?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox

(I get the statistics, but personally I would still happily sign up to be tested for everything possible.)

I had a similar situation. I was diagnosed with stage ii testicular cancer after an ultrasound and a blood test, which consisted of a simple blood test for a particular female pregnancy hormone. I would have gladly paid for that test every year, hell every month, if they could have detected it earlier.

All that said, good luck with your treatment. That's a much tougher diagnosis than mine was.

The CEA is useful for prognosis, staging and follow up. It is useless for diagnosis.

"The CEA test has a specificity of between 30-80% and it is not recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for the diagnosis of early colorectal cancer" http://www.patient.co.uk/doctor/carcinoembryonic-antigen-cea

Causes of false postive CEA include but are not confined to:

"Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

Pancreatitis.

Liver disease.

Tobacco use can lead to elevated CEA levels. (CEA is elevated in 19% of smokers and only 3% of the non-smoking healthy population.)

Diverticulitis.

Hepatitis.

Peptic ulcers.

Hypothyroidism.

Cirrhosis of the liver.

COPD.

Lung infection.

Pleural effusions.

Biliary obstruction.

Treatment with oral 5-FU.

High serum glutamic-pyruvic transaminase (sGPT) levels.

Non-malignant liver disease, including cirrhosis, chronic active hepatitis.[6]

Chronic kidney disease.

Pancreatic disease.[7]

Inflammatory bowel disease, diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome.

Respiratory diseases, eg pleural inflammation, pneumonia.

Smoking.

Ageing.[8]

Atherosclerosis

"http://www.kantrowitz.com/cancerpoints/tumormarkerfalseposit...

Hey, here is wishing you all the very best in your treatment. I really hope you will come out stronger!

both, also for areas such as single molecule imaging

These nanodiamonds are cheaper to synthesize than what you find current optical imaging agents on the market for.

you are correct, this is primarily targeted to disease states with ligands such as antibodies, aptamers, fab fragments, etc.

This is the key issue. Detection by antibodies or some other label will be the true discovery. Binding that to nanodiamonds or whatever isn't the bottleneck.

The in vivo pathologies and applications we are targeting initially are primarily nearer to the surface (i.e metastatic node detection, skin pathologies) or procedures where surgeons can use NIR fluorescence imaging systems that simultaneously display color video and NIR images have been developed for real-time surgical applications. Though this wasn't a focus in today's article, along with in vivo applications, we are working on a number of applications for microscopy and ex vivo diagnostics.

these probes can be visualized by standard fluorescence imaing instruments including fluorescence microscopes, TIRF, gel scanners, flow cytometry, optical animal scanners, clinical cameras etc. They also have long fluorescence lifetimes and so can be imaged by fluorescence lifetime instruments. What the article didn't delve into is that because of an additional magnetic sensitivity that the nanodiamonds have, we can improve image quality and imaging deeper into tissue with an additional hardware piece that we can add on to existing systems or in a stand-alone system that is cheaper to be tailored to n=only nanodiamonds. if you want more info on this, I can elaborate or have a chat with you

Thanks for the props! We plan to offer a few different sizes of the brightest diamonds possible to our customers. The sizing and separation of the nanodiamonds can be accomplished a few different ways, the challenge is always in preventing aggregation. Bikanta's secret sauce is in our process to stabilize and functionalize the particles, irregardless of what the size and initial residues are on the surface.

My thoughts exactly. Also, depending on the location, there are typically a large amount of public funds earmarked as grants for commercialization in this field. It's not the typical tech-company fundraising situation either. The marketing needs are also vastly different from the companies you mentioned.

I'm glad you asked! I would encourage you to look at this article where YC recently announced how it will be backing bitechs: http://www.nature.com/news/start-up-investor-bets-on-biotech.... We are excited to see this shift in attitude towards biotech investing and wanted to jump on board early. What makes us a a fit for this is our business strategy that is a closer fit to the "style" of companies that come through YC. For a typical biotech with clinical targets in mind, to bring those to market after FDA approval and clinical trials is a long process with returns being 7-12 years down the line. In our case, there is an identified research tools market that we can tap into first that would make us profitable by next year. By establishing an early source of revenue, we mitigate risk for our investors. Through YC we have a platform and the opportunity to reach wider umbrella of investors to share our story and strategy with.

I'm happy to answer these technical questions. It's nice to share that info as that is what makes them so valuable. The fluorescence comes from nitrogen-vacancy centers. Here is a link showing the excitation and emissions spectrum. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/NVple.JPG

The Stokes shift, as you can see is very large. The quantum yield is 1 and they don't blink. We are initially focusing on stabilized nanodiamonds with various chemical groups put on the surface to have them ready for further conjugation. Email us at info@bikanta.com and I can have a further conversation with you if you would like.

that is actually one area of applications we are exploring! I'd love to have a chat with you about it.

Which project? CTC screening is fascinating. Could you please point me to some good introductory papers/reading?

Agreed, for now. Caveats TBD. In particular issues of access (e.g. astrocytomas, non-metastatic bladder) and identity (what does it mean to be a CTC? A known driver mutation? We know that some tissues are littered with such mutations...)

You should get in touch with the folks at Denovo Sciences. They're working on a platform for CTC capture and identification.

http://denovosciences.com/

If they are in fact small enough to escape via biliary excretion, that would be great. But just skimming the literature it looks like they can accumulate and persist for weeks in the liver—a situation which would suggest hepatotoxicity is another problem (Zhu et al 2012 in "Theranostics" -- never heard of that journal but paper looks 'ok').

Coatings won't help this problem unless you can somehow change the shape of the crystal to fit through the slit OR get it to cross into the renal luminal space via transcytosis or excreted more efficiently in the biliary tree. All difficult propositions.

I really hope novel techniques like this work but this particular on seems very problematic. If I were you I would complete a serious set of toxicity studies very early on to make sure this isn't a fish that's dead in the water.

Edits: clarifying the points

Because you don't treat someone for a disease that they haven't been diagnosed for. The idea that you'd prophylactically give someone these nanodiamonds is a big stretch at this point... especially when the PR is that "It’s like having a flashlight inside your body that basically lasts forever." You really want to have a method for turning off the flashlight when you don't need it.

Now, if you have a patient that has been already diagnosed with cancer, and the nanodiamonds are used to monitor tumor progression or watch for metastasis, then that's a different story.

Note: these aren't the same as vaccines, since cancer isn't a communicable disease (largely).