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Comment by mswen | Hacker News Reader

I understand that journalists often create a simplified straw-man to contrast to a new and innovative upstart, however as someone who once served as an industry analyst at the intersection of life science discovery and technical computing this article's characterization of how big pharma approach drug discovery seems almost cartoon like in its stereotyping of the discovery and development process at big pharma.

Can you point us to a link that has a more substantive discussion of the approach that you are taking?

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Hi there - thanks for the interest! For a more technical dissection of some of the genomics approaches we employ to identify neurodegenerative disease targets, check out these reviews:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7266/full/nature0... http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v16/n8/pdf/nrg3934.pdf

I don't currently have access to those publications and not willing to pay just to read these articles but from the titles, abstracts and citations it sounds like basically you are taking a systems biology and GWAS approach?

The Institute for Systems Biology has been around since 2000. I remember interviewing people in an internal systems biology group at one of the largest pharma companies in the world in 2004 and writing about their work. Admittedly, they were a small unit intended to drive innovation within discovery at that pharma. By 2007 it had been at least tried in most major pharma companies and John Russell was writing about the Awkward Adolescence of Systems Biology.

http://www.bio-itworld.com/issues/2007/sept/cover-story/

Even if your characterization that large pharma prefer a different approach is mostly accurate it is a substantial disservice to the intelligence and hard work of hundreds of scientists who have worked on applying systems biology to the study of disease and treatments.

Maybe I am over-reacting to this article and your video ...but from 2000 to 2004 I heard so many biotech and related software executives tell me that their company was going to solve these same discovery and development problems. Most faded into oblivion, others found a useful niche and a few got targets identified and development started and were acquired by a large pharma to bring them to market.

I sincerely hope that you have discovered a new approach to system biology that will in fact provide breakthroughs. If you have something great let it stand on its own merits; there is no need to misrepresent the hard work and investments of other scientists or the companies they work for.

Keep in mind that this article was not written by the founders of Verge Genomics, but by a journalist who "writes about internet culture, social networks, and consumer-facing technology." So they are probably going to use speech that will make the more science/biotech literate person bristle.

Does YC provide advice to tech companies about communicating complex ideas to not so technical writers and a non technical audience?

YC doesn't provide advice about this in a systematic way, but we have been trying to learn how to engage the lay public mostly from talking to other YC founders. It's hard to communicate the exact details that we want to share, but I hope that the spirit of our ideas comes across clearly.

That was my first thought - my other comment put the initial onus on the journalist for creating a strawman opponent. However, when writing my second comment with a little history of systems biology - including within large pharma - I thought I should go watch the video. The founders basically say the same kind of stuff in their video. So we cannot blame it all on the journalist.

Ahh, I should have watched the video before I had the knee-jerk reaction to be so charitable. They could have just done what grad students are basically trained to do: use your narrow expertise to bullshit people and tie in some buzzwords that grant funding agencies like to hear. I hope I am just being cynical and that YC knows what they are doing here.

Our video definitely was geared toward a lay audience, but we tried not to use buzzwords and bullshit and to explain the science in a more accessible way. I'm curious to know what what bothered you about the video and we will try to communicate better - at least for me, conveying scientific ideas in an understandable way has been pretty challenging and I had hoped we did a good job in the video.

I really appreciate your feedback and of course we have studied a lot of what worked (and mostly, didn't work) in systems biology over the past decade, but the field has shifted dramatically since 2004. A lot more data is available, and experiments are designed much more carefully nowadays. In fact, the thing we worry about most is that the field still isn't rigorous enough and the quality of the data still isn't good enough to translate into druggable targets. And we don't intend to belittle the work of scientists who really laid the foundation for what we are trying to do today, but surprisingly few of the big pharma companies we talked to have active systems biology programs for neurological diseases (we have also learned about others, like at Janssen, that are just getting started). I think it's not a question of if systems biology will lead to new therapies, but rather when the methods and field are mature enough.

Also regarding articles, please email me at jason@vergegenomics.com and I will send you PDF versions to read.

Thanks I will shoot you an email. Your response in this thread is the kind of more nuanced and accurate positioning of what you are doing and why systems biology might now be ripe to make a real difference in the drug discovery phase. It really isn't that hard of a message to convey.

I have been doing other things since 2004 and not following pharma and biotech closely. It appears that what has happened is large pharma invested in systems biology in the early 2000's and by the end of the decade had let it fade. It may also be true that it never made it into specific disease groups, like neurological.

Systems Biology feels a little like AI in the software field. It feels so intuitive that it will one day make a big difference, but there have been many big investments and disappointments over the years, but each time it makes a resurgence we get a lot of advancement in narrow domains. And, it still feels like one day, maybe soon we will get breakthrough's in more general AI and maybe you will lead the way with SB.

A certain confidence, even brashness of youth is ok, but please understand how "tinny" it sounds to people who have been around for one or two boom/bust cycles. Forgive us our cynicism.

> I understand that journalists often create a simplified straw-man to contrast to a new and innovative upstart, however as someone who once served as an industry analyst at the intersection of life science discovery and technical computing this article's characterization of how big pharma approach drug discovery seems almost cartoon like in its stereotyping of the discovery and development process at big pharma.

Journalists often don't create the simplified strawmen, the PR staff writing the press releases for the firm that they are covering do that for them.

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