
Real time microRNA detection - sebst
http://miroculus.com/product/
======
aroch
First off, there's probably nothing particularly new or exciting about their
"patented biochemistry". Amplifying miRNA and sRNA is relatively easy and
takes very little time and is something we've been doing for decades --
polymerases can PCR the entirely of one in 0.5-2 seconds and that "as little
as 60mins" claim is a result of this and by no means revolutionary. They're
essentially doing qRT-PCR in a plate, which would cost me ~$50-80 to do in my
lab. This is another case of the patent office being out of their depth and
granting patents to anything that sounds magical but believable to a
layperson.

Plus I don't need yet another company improperly mining heath data.

On top of that, doesn't anyone else think this is a bad idea to try to test
everyone for low incidence diseases? miRNA and sRNAs are OK markers for
disease, not great and certainly not definitive. You're guaranteeing that most
of your positives are false positives.

~~~
nmjohn
I think you're missing the point - at least how I'm reading it - the idea is
the user friendliness, not that the techniques themselves are novel.

You're absolutely correct that PCR and DNA/RNA amplification tech is nothing
new and is (relatively) very simple - to the point where I did it in high
school biology (AP) 6 years ago and then a number of times in undergrad labs.

However I am not aware of anything that makes it this easy for a nurse/doctor
to do in the hospital - as they put it "without the need of a specialized
technician or expensive lab machinery."

There isn't enough information provided to know how useful it will be though.
I can see some potentially interesting use cases where a nurse being able to
take a blood sample and run a plate with results in an hour could save a lot
of time and money. At the same time, it really comes down to the "patented
biochemistry" and what specific markers are on the plates.

> On top of that, doesn't anyone else think this is a bad idea to try to test
> everyone for low incidence diseases? miRNA and sRNAs are OK markers for
> disease, not great and certainly not definitive. You're guaranteeing that
> most of your positives are false positives.

That is highly dependant on the disease in question, no?

~~~
aroch
I'm not missing the point. It's a company cashing in on Silicon Valley's
recent health disruption bullshit. A well established miRNA testing protocol
has been around for about 8 years now and there's an open database of markers.
This testing isn't being used because it isn't "user friendly", it isn't being
used because there are better methods or the information provided is useless.
There are some 1800 'neoplasm associated' miRNAs (abnormal growths), being
positive for many of them means next to nothing. Every person has hundreds and
thousands of cells undergoing abnormal growth that doesn't mean they have bona
fide cancer but they will, after non-specific PCR amplification, ping as "Has
Cancer".

They have a sample prep that likely involves several chemicals that no
layperson should ever work with and no nurse/doctor has any business dealing
with. At most they would what they already do, a blood draw and the hospital
lab will do the rest.

~~~
nmjohn
I'm curious where you're getting any of that information from the linked page
- I very well may be missing something, but you are making a ton of
assumptions [0] whereas I was giving them the benefit of the doubt until more
information is known.

Additionally, there are uses extending beyond cancer that are much more
"binary" in nature which is where I see the value.

[0]: * They have a sample prep that likely involves several chemicals that no
layperson should ever work with

* what they already do, a blood draw and the hospital lab will do the rest.

~~~
aroch
It's step 1 of their "3 easy steps"[0].... If you read their Wired profile[1],
it's clear there's sample prep involved. I do RNA work quite frequently, (high
quality) RNA preparation is finicky and involves reagents you can't buy as a
normal person and equipment that may not be "specialized" but isn't in your
standard Gen practitioners office and definitely in effectively 0 homes. High
throughput RNA extraction -- which is what their Mastermix is -- yields OK-ish
quality RNA but works fairly well if you have well optimized RT-primers. There
are several caveats to quick extractions though, the two big ones for this
product are it doesn't work well for human tissue or blood samples and they're
either not doing very much testing (literally only 96 specific tests) or
they're doing broad range testing and not using optimized primers because
there's not a lot of RNA in any given sample. My guess is a combination of the
two, there's a reason why the real microarrays we run for research are both
expensive and time consuming.

Doctors already "test" for things, and by that we mean the doctors have nurses
do a blood draw and that blood draw is sent the the hospital lab. And the
hospital lab does the testing. Even with this device, it's still the hospital
lab that's going to do the testing. Your lab results don't necessarily take a
while to come back because they're hard or cumbersome or take a ton of time to
do, they take a while because the lab is running more than just your samples
and your doctor has more than one patient (and also might like to sleep at
some point). Most labs (that don't need something like culturing) can easily
come back in less than 24hours and assuming you were the only one could come
back in just a few hours.

I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, they've shown nothing
to merit it. Mass producing what appears to be a hotplate with a non-tunable
$5 laser inside a sleek, shiny baby blue case and making a companion iPhone
app is gimicky.

There aren't that many diseases that present as binary and those that do have
existing, proven tests.

[0]: "1\. Extract the total RNA from the patient's blood sample and pipette it
in a standard 96 well plate "

[1]
[http://www.wired.com/2014/10/miroculus/](http://www.wired.com/2014/10/miroculus/)

"You can prepare the blood sample, for instance, using a standard off-the-
shelf RNA extraction kit, as well as a Miroculus 'master mix'"

