4 ms·

Is this something private labs offer?

• nextos 4y ago
  Yes, and it's not very expensive. Many EU & US labs would do a test for you for ~$300--$500. I guess it'd be really cheap if it was deployed nationwide. Furthermore, predictions would be a lot more sensitive / specific as they would be tuned with millions of datapoints. It's the same for other technologies such as TCR-seq. They could theoretically bring immense prevention benefits, but it's really hard to bootstrap them without collaboration from big healthcare systems as you need thousands of datapoints to get it going. Very frustrating.
  • drBonkers 4y ago
    Would there be an opportunity to advertise this online and provide an end-to-end service of testing on an interval basis to customers? Subsidized by VC money on the promise of valuable data sets for this sensitivity/specificity in the long term?
    • nextos 4y ago
      I truly think so. The real hurdle is to get into a collaboration with a reasonably organized healthcare provider that lets you access a sufficiently large pool of donors, with electronic health records and the capability to follow them up. Bonus points if you can genotype them, i.e. measure common genetic variants using a chip similar to e.g. the one used by 23andme. Most tumors have an association with variants in the HLA region, and pre-screening susceptible individuals will reduce sample sizes and therefore initial costs to bootstrap. The same applies to TCR-seq and other biomarkers which are incredibly useful to detect autoimmune disorders really early in the process. In case you are interested in discussing this further, just get in touch via email (on my profile).