
Why synthetic biology and the Netflix model are the future of medicine - amaks
http://gigaom.com/2014/05/03/the-gigaom-interview-why-synthetic-biology-and-the-netflix-model-are-the-future-of-medicine/
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dnautics
1) the glowing plant project isn't doing that great. There have been scant
technical updates to their blog, despite the promises of their founders, and
they've quietly pushed the delivery date from April to July.

2) the ability to print large quantities of DNA for a given patient is not
really going to be necessary. For the most part any "biologic" drug that might
need to be personalized is most likely going to be 99% common "boilerplate"
plus 1% or less "personalization". For example, antibodies, which have a
massive common region plus a small amount of variable region that is an
'adapter' to whatever you're going to use the antibody for. We are well, well
within the ability to synthesize this amount of DNA at an affordable cost, and
have been for a while. Not to mention that you'll still be giving 'the same
drug' to more than one person, that's because human variation is not that high
(especially everywhere except for africa due to population bottlenecks in
human migration).

3) The point about the netflix model is an interesting one.

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icegreentea
One of the things worth pointing out is that biological effects are
hilariously noisy. Even many of our best genetic correlates aren't that clear
cut. A lot of what we know still relies on large sample sizes to help cut
through real confounding factors. And if that's what it takes to detect causal
genetic effects, then we'll have to understand whatever we do to 'fix' these
(whatever approach we take) will have to deal with the same type of issues.

In other words, personalized medicine isn't going to be this amazing thing
that will let us conquer all our illnesses. It will be a tool that will bring
significant improvements, possibly even order of magnitude improvements to
those with the right genes or illnesses, but it's not magic.

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refurb
Computer simulations of living cells? We've got a _long_ way to go before we
get to that point.

The current techniques we have to model _single molecules_ in natural
environments (solutions) isn't that great right now. Modeling a cell is
several magnitudes more difficult.

