
How one woman made a ‘tricorder’ that could change medicine [video] - snake117
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151204-how-one-woman-made-a-tricorder-that-could-change-medicine
======
kenbellows
TL;DR: The device in question, Gene Radar, is a "tricorder" only in the sense
that it's a mobile health diagnostic tool, not in the Star Trek sense of a
handheld external scanner that will will give you information about a person
or object from a distance without direct physical contact. Based on the video
in the article, it still requires a blood sample to be inserted for direct
analysis. Really cool, but not quite a Star Trek tricorder just yet.

~~~
smanuel
Even with the blood sample "shortcoming", it will be huge if it keeps to its
promise.

But I learned not to get excited by new medical inventions before a few years
pass, before it's FDA approved, before there are enough studies that prove it
_really_ does what it _says_ it does, etc.

Cool video. A woman writing some formulas, nano technology, DNA sequences,
etc. All cool stuff.

Theranos also had some cool stuff to show but...

~~~
jrowley
I agree, it's super cheesy/cliche that she is writing formulas on windows and
stuff, but it makes for nice TV.

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100ideas
"Nanobiosym" is living up to its namesake with the nano-level of technical
information provided in their press releases about their "revolutionary"
GeneRADAR(R) platform. Plenty of hype, though (from their "Nanobiosym
Confidential Video" published on youtube[1]):

"we can actually _stop_ the transmission of HIV to the next generation! ...
GeneRADAR(R) will empower you to personalize your healthcare experience by not
only detecting but also _preventing_ diseases before you manifest symptoms!

Big claims, Nanobiosym! Tell us more! Reading between the lines, based on your
references to PCR, gold standard diagnostics, and "reading and writing DNA at
the nanoscale" \- just another PCR reference, presumably - it sounds as if you
are developing a point-of-care qPCR[2] system that does sample prep in
microfluidic cartridges. Wooooooo - there must be more to your _platform_ than
that, however, because if low-cost reliable qPCR diagnostics alone could
really "stop the transmission of HIV to the next generation" or "prevent
diseases before you manifest symptoms," then surely the international public
health community, not to mention wealthy western medical systems, would
already have deployed qPCR diagnostics on a global scale, _compelled_ by the
moral and economic disease-preventing, life-saving benefits you claim.

qPCR really _is_ a powerful technology with the potential to improve
healthcare for everyone, everywhere, but incremental technical innovations
will not solve the regulatory and clinical hurdles that have thus far
prevented it's widespread use.

Personally, I am much more excited about Chai Bio's disruptively-priced Open
qPCR machine - open-source hardware, 1/5th the price of the competition at
$3.5k per unit, and they just started shipping units [3].

I can't stand it when bombastic, vapid corporate PR gets press like this. DEMO
or BUST, Nanobiosym!

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFPo4pjT40k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFPo4pjT40k)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
time_polymerase_chain_rea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
time_polymerase_chain_reaction)

[3] [https://www.chaibio.com](https://www.chaibio.com)

~~~
100ideas
Regardless of the corporate claptrap, if we give Nanobiosym the benefit of the
doubt and assume their geneRADAR platform does advance the state of the art in
qPCR, microfluidics, and point-of-care diagnostics, what might that advance
be?

It may have to do with how much blood they need for each multiplex test.
Clinical qPCR diagnostics need at least 5-10 uL of blood for each test
(ballpark minimum). A finger prick or dried blood sample card [1] may provide
enough DNA (human or pathogen depending on the test) for one or two of these
tests, but not more. To run 100 or 1000 tests in parallel, a lab would need
5-50 mL of blood. Easy to get from a venous blood draw but not easy in the
field.

So perhaps Nanobiosym is developing a reliable method purifying DNA from blood
and running multiplex qPCR at nanoscale volumes, and possibly enriching the
purified DNA first for particular pathogen DNA sequences with a non-qPCR
method. The capability to run hundreds of qPCR-based diagnostic tests in
parallel from a single finger prick of blood would result in significant
improvements in clinical convenience and reagent cost-savings.

It's an interesting challenge: in a person who is HIV positive but hasn't
presented with AIDS, how many viral genomes can be expected to be found on
average in a single finger prick of blood (viral titer)? It could be on
average only 0.001 - 1 genome [2]

[1]
[http://www.spotonsciences.com/dbstechnology/](http://www.spotonsciences.com/dbstechnology/)

[2] _" If a subject has a high HIV viral load (for example, at least 1 ,000
copies/ml plasma), this may indicate treatment failure, i.e. that the virus is
replicating and the disease may progress more quickly. If HIV viral load is
low (for example, less than 1 ,000 copies/ml plasma), this indicates that the
anti-viral treatment regimen is effective, i.e. that the virus may not be
actively replicating and the disease may progress more slowly."_ \-
[http://www.google.com/patents/WO2014140641A1?cl=en](http://www.google.com/patents/WO2014140641A1?cl=en)

~~~
100ideas
Or... they could be chaining polymerases to tiny tuning-forks to tune the
speed and fidelity of DNA replication... _sounds_ pretty cool!

From a patent granted to Anita Goel / Nanobiosym:
[https://www.google.com/patents/US7494791](https://www.google.com/patents/US7494791)

 _" Denaturation of double stranded nucleic acids, primer annealing, and
precision control over primer extension by polymerase can be accomplished by
applying stress to a nucleic acid. These methods can provide one ore more
benefits over conventional PCR methods including: precision control over the
PCR process; generally improved fidelity; improved accuracy over
problematic... [etc etc]"_

------
ljk
Am I reading too much into the title? Seems like whenever there's a new thing
made by female the titles have to emphasize it, almost like it's out of the
ordinary for women to make something. I can't remember titles like "How one
man made something..." or "How a team of only men made this..." The
accomplishments are impressive regardless of gender!

~~~
fao_
Hmm, it seems to me that it is part of an attempt to get women interested in
these fields; along the lines of "Oh there are successful women in this field,
you could be just like them".

However, although role models help, I do not believe[0] this is the right way
to go. Actively advertising that "X thing/project was made/led by a woman!"
implies on some level that it is _special event_ , and unusual. I think
perhaps we would have better success with subtle raising of the exposure of
women in the industry[1], so instead of explicitly mentioning the gender, have
a higher frequency of posts and news articles where women were the lead of
projects or of teams that have a majority of women researchers.

In short: I think that increasing the public's perception of how many women
there are in a field without drawing attention to it as a special case, would
increase the amount of women studying in the field.

At the same time, this is more difficult to implement. So unless a bunch of
newspapers collaborate on this, it seems that we are stuck with the former for
now.

[0]: I am always willing to be proven incorrect, however :)

[1]: And also with investing more effort into preventing the rejection and
pushing away of women who are studying.

------
sosuke
If you can't watch the video, or have audio for whatever reason, her company
news room page has plenty of content about the device
[http://www.nanobiosym.com/index.php/news-
room/](http://www.nanobiosym.com/index.php/news-room/)

rant: I've never liked article titles like these

------
Someone1234
I actually think that is massively cool. In particular for remote areas or for
natural disaster response where local hospitals could be unsafe/unavailable.

I will say comparing it to a "tricorder" does the device a disservice. It
isn't even trying to be one, it is trying to be something else entirely, and
all it will get for being called that is criticism that it isn't tricorder-
enough.

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atomicbeanie
Of course if there is no privacy with the resulting data or the DNA input to
the machine, adoption may become difficult. What will the government do with
such information: [http://www.innocenceproject.org/free-innocent/improve-the-
la...](http://www.innocenceproject.org/free-innocent/improve-the-law/fact-
sheets/dna-exonerations-nationwide)

------
no1ne
[http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/november/tricorder-
device...](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/november/tricorder-device-
arbabian-110915.html)

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dharma1
very cool. How far are we with this type of devices? Cost? Availability?

