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"Nanobiosym" is living up to its namesake with the nano-level of technical information provided in their press releases about their "revolutionary" GeneRADAR(R)

"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_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_polymerase_chain_rea... [3] https://www.chaibio.com https://www.chaibio.com

100ideas 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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]"

100ideas 11y ago

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 11y ago
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]"