4 ms·

What ever happened to the point-of-care test developed by a teenager (Jack Andraka) using CNTs to isolate and test for mesothelin, a potential biomarker for pan

by rosser 9y ago

What ever happened to the point-of-care test developed by a teenager (Jack Andraka) using CNTs to isolate and test for mesothelin, a potential biomarker for pancreatic cancer? EDIT: Looks like it's tied up in various patent and testing limbos, the former of which seem somewhat self-imposed. There's also some doubt about the specificity of mesothelin to pancreatic cancer.

msie 9y ago
Ugh, I wonder how we ever make any process nowadays.
lazerpants 9y ago
The most promising early warning tests I've seen in the past few years look at degraded DNA fragments floating in the blood that have been shed by cancers. This will probably be the winning technology for all cancer early diagnoses, though genetic biomarkers will probably fail to catch all cancers.
- gms7777 9y ago
  Circulating tumor DNA has several challenges towards being an effective test. The first is just the relatively low proportion of it in the blood (especially before growth is significant) makes reliable detection fairly difficult. The bigger issue though will likely be managing the false discovery rate. Nearly everyone will have precancerous growths and benign lesions which may share many genetic biomarkers with potentially malignant growths. Many genetic variants associated with cancers occur years or decades before the development of a tumor. It may be difficult to develop a test that doesn't have a difficult tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity, prior to significant tumor growth. I do think its a promising approach, however, and look forward to see the progress researchers make in the coming years. Relatedly, circulating tumor DNA is not only useful in diagnosis, but its already proving to be useful in the treatment of cancer. Its much less invasive than surgical biopsy, and as a result, clinicians can track the evolution of the tumor, response to specific treatments, and development of resistance in way that was just never possible before.
  - obstinate 9y ago
    One wonders if one could train a neural network to look at the mix of junk in the blood and predict what a person will have died of in five years. At this point I'm sure the idea is science fiction. But seeing how DeepMind's AlphaGo played that game, teasing out moves that are beyond human conception routinely, one begins to suspect that there must be some signal that a sufficiently intelligent device could suss out. I suspect that one decade we will consider this idea almost impossible, and by the end of the next, it will seem old hat. I just wonder which decade that will end up being.
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    All completely true. But I can easily imagine a near future in which some populations receive screening and then further investigation if something is found. Of course, that creates additional burden on radiology, which is unfortunate, but hopefully all the breakthroughs in ML will make those resources less expensive.
mikeyouse 9y ago
It's almost always safe to ignore any 'Wonder Teenager makes Breakthrough' articles if the field of the breakthrough is hard science. The likelihood of a novice inventing something novel in a field with tens of thousands of PhDs is so incredibly low that the breakthrough is almost guaranteed to be overstated. George Church (and others) looked at Andraka's preprinted paper and wasn't exactly blown away. The cost and speed comparisons were wrong, the sensitivity and specificity were both too low to be clinically useful, and like you pointed out, mesothelin has some intractable problems when trying to diagnose tumors. https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/01/08/why-biotech-whiz-kid-jack-andraka-is-not-on-the-forbes-30-under-30-list/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/01/08/why-bi... Kids with the aptitude and interest to devote themselves to biotech or engineering should absolutely be encouraged but putting them on the cover of magazines never works out.
- honestoHeminway 9y ago
  It often turns what could be a very fruitfull career- with contributions to a breakthrough- into a one-trick-pony. My grandfather, a professor for chemistry, did as a student research on ion exchange resin - which later became valuable applied to water softeners. He did a lot of interesting research later when it came to analytical sciences (radio-chemistry) but that early success sort of over-shadowed everything. Its a haunting experience, unless you dono longer externalize your value as a researcher.

by rosser 9y ago

msie 9y ago

Ugh, I wonder how we ever make any process nowadays.

lazerpants 9y ago

The most promising early warning tests I've seen in the past few years look at degraded DNA fragments floating in the blood that have been shed by cancers. This will probably be the winning technology for all cancer early diagnoses, though genetic biomarkers will probably fail to catch all cancers.

gms7777 9y ago
Circulating tumor DNA has several challenges towards being an effective test. The first is just the relatively low proportion of it in the blood (especially before growth is significant) makes reliable detection fairly difficult. The bigger issue though will likely be managing the false discovery rate. Nearly everyone will have precancerous growths and benign lesions which may share many genetic biomarkers with potentially malignant growths. Many genetic variants associated with cancers occur years or decades before the development of a tumor. It may be difficult to develop a test that doesn't have a difficult tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity, prior to significant tumor growth. I do think its a promising approach, however, and look forward to see the progress researchers make in the coming years. Relatedly, circulating tumor DNA is not only useful in diagnosis, but its already proving to be useful in the treatment of cancer. Its much less invasive than surgical biopsy, and as a result, clinicians can track the evolution of the tumor, response to specific treatments, and development of resistance in way that was just never possible before.
- obstinate 9y ago
  One wonders if one could train a neural network to look at the mix of junk in the blood and predict what a person will have died of in five years. At this point I'm sure the idea is science fiction. But seeing how DeepMind's AlphaGo played that game, teasing out moves that are beyond human conception routinely, one begins to suspect that there must be some signal that a sufficiently intelligent device could suss out. I suspect that one decade we will consider this idea almost impossible, and by the end of the next, it will seem old hat. I just wonder which decade that will end up being.
- lazerpants 9y ago
  All completely true. But I can easily imagine a near future in which some populations receive screening and then further investigation if something is found. Of course, that creates additional burden on radiology, which is unfortunate, but hopefully all the breakthroughs in ML will make those resources less expensive.

mikeyouse 9y ago

It's almost always safe to ignore any 'Wonder Teenager makes Breakthrough' articles if the field of the breakthrough is hard science. The likelihood of a novice inventing something novel in a field with tens of thousands of PhDs is so incredibly low that the breakthrough is almost guaranteed to be overstated. George Church (and others) looked at Andraka's preprinted paper and wasn't exactly blown away. The cost and speed comparisons were wrong, the sensitivity and specificity were both too low to be clinically useful, and like you pointed out, mesothelin has some intractable problems when trying to diagnose tumors. https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/01/08/why-biotech-whiz-kid-jack-andraka-is-not-on-the-forbes-30-under-30-list/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/01/08/why-bi... Kids with the aptitude and interest to devote themselves to biotech or engineering should absolutely be encouraged but putting them on the cover of magazines never works out.

honestoHeminway 9y ago
It often turns what could be a very fruitfull career- with contributions to a breakthrough- into a one-trick-pony. My grandfather, a professor for chemistry, did as a student research on ion exchange resin - which later became valuable applied to water softeners. He did a lot of interesting research later when it came to analytical sciences (radio-chemistry) but that early success sort of over-shadowed everything. Its a haunting experience, unless you dono longer externalize your value as a researcher.