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I work for another player Guardant Health. We are the Liquid Biopsy market leaders right now. We just raised $360M Series E from SoftBank. If you find this typ
by gourneau 9y ago
I work for another player Guardant Health. We are the Liquid Biopsy market leaders right now. We just raised $360M Series E from SoftBank.
If you find this type of thing interesting and want to be part of it, we are hiring lots of folks. My team is looking for bioinformaticians, Python hackers, and machine learning people. Please reach out to me if you want to know more jgourneau@guardanthealth.com
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zorm 9y agoGuardant Health is a member of the Blood Profiling Atlas for Cancer (https://www.bloodpac.org/members/ https://www.bloodpac.org/members/) too with a commitment to opening up data for faster discovery. So they're good people! Now you have to wonder why John Hopkins isn't party to it...
- _bohm 9y agoHate to be that guy, but as an alum I have to correct this. It's Johns* Hopkins.
- dEnigma 9y agoInteresting. I always heard it as "John Hopkins", and I guess every time I read it I also auto-corrected it to "John" in my head. It's actually his great-grandmother's maiden name[1] [1]http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history/history1.html http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history/history1.html
- doctoring 9y agoThe company mentioned in the original article (and where a lot of the research was done) is a Hopkins spinout -- Personal Genome Diagnostics. They are indeed a member of BloodPAC.
- IBM 9y agoSo is Illumina basically the "selling pickaxes during a gold rush" of this space?
- killjoywashere 9y agoYes. Other cool sequencing out there, Pac Bio being the most frequent contender, but illumina has their HiSeq and MiSeq systems in the vast majority of human molecular pathology labs. I may be biased as I trained under their chief geneticist, who's now at UCSD, but I'm fairly confident that's a safe claim. The big issue, as I understand it, is QC. QC for illumina is well understood. QC for Pac Bio can hard.
- Gatsky 9y agoAdditionally, circulating tumor DNA is fragmented to short lengths, so there is no point in doing long read sequencing such as PacBio or Nanopore.
- adenadel 9y agoI'm not sure if anyone can claim to be the market leader in liquid biopsy right now. If raising money is your metric for success, then Grail has raised $1B and has the backing of the world's leading DNA sequencing company (Illumina).
- amelius 9y agoAlso, with currently available techniques, how difficult is this field really?
- hentrep 9y agoDifferent tumor types have different tumor DNA shedding rates -- this has impacts on test sensitivity. A false negative is not great when dealing with a cancer diagnostic. Additionally, and more challenging, is the variant classification problem. Not all mutations are created equally. Some are pathogenic, some of benign, and some have unknown significance. If you simply report the genetic alteration, and I believe this is the approach taken by Guardant, the onus is on the oncology care team to determine whether the alteration is clinically relevant and actionable. Companies like Myriad and Foundation Medicine provide guidance on alterations which makes this less of a problem. The alternative is for a caregiver to do homework on the alteration and determine whether it is meaningful (through a literature search or ClinVar database query). Variant classification alone is an incredibly challenging problem. Oncologists are not geneticists, and most hospitals do not have in-house geneticists. Additionally, there is potential liability involved with mischaracterizing genetic alterations.
- pragone 9y agoThis might be the first time in the 7 years I've my degree in it that someone has said they're actually "looking for bioinformaticians"...