JunkDNA

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A Startlingly Good Leukemia Trial(pipeline.corante.com)
2 points by JunkDNA 15y ago|1 comments
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Just to update this since there was so much interest, I looked into the literature a bit more closely. First off, at the end of the article it says "Supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (K24 CA11787901, 1PN2-EY
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
simcop2387 is right in that the biology here gives them a leg-up on what would otherwise be an even more difficult problem. The whole class of lentiviruses (of which HIV is part) are useful for delivering genes to target cells. In this case
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Thanks for your comments. The pharma industry has a lousy public perception, some of which is quite justified, so it can be hard to separate the reality from the perception. There is also a practical reason why I can assure you that people
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
The problem here is one of sampling bias. You're seeing an example of one "outside the box" idea that worked out of thousands that didn't. The NIH and pharmas are constantly getting pitched on (and funding) ideas for innovative new therapie
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
I spent 8 years in pharmaceutical industry R&D and this is so ill-informed I feel compelled to refute it every time someone says it. I know it sounds like it makes sense on the surface, but it's just outright false. I worked in cancer r
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
The main issue is that for this to work, you need to know specifically what antigen you're targeting on the tumor cells. Think of the antigen as a unique tag that the immune system can use to differentiate cells (a "natural key" if you will
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Yep, we've cured cancer in mice several times over. Humans are the hard part.
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
This still has massive hurdles. If you're going to have nanobots running around in your bloodstream, you need to protect them from the immune system. Worst case, you might have a massive immune response against the nanobots that causes a pe
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
"In the short term, these micro-robots could be used to deliver cancer drugs (or any kind of medication) in a highly-targeted fashion, rather than the carpet bombing approach that is currently used" You can almost always find the cancer the
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Congrats on launching! Some comments: 1)Even though I know you guys are from YC (and not for example the Russian mob). I still bailed when you asked for my driver's license # and SSN. It's not enough for you to just say "trust us". 2) I che
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
You have to read to the end to find out that it has only been confirmed in mice. We have cured practically every major medical condition in mice. The human part is the hard part. I'm skeptical that this mechanism wouldn't have some pretty s
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Wow. Thanks for sharing that. I had never heard of these two men until now.
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Agree totally. It doesn't really appeal to me personally, but Microsoft in particular is trying to do some new things from a UI and software perspective with Windows Phone. From what I have read about it, it actually seems like one of the f
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Astute observation. Reminds me of this pg classic on PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html The timing is certainly convenient for Google.
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
My team has struggled to decide how to build a rich JS app precisely because there are so many choices. We have spent a lot of time looking at the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major ones. All that time was time spent not coding.
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
This was really fascinating. It just goes to show you that there is a whole lot more than just code with something like this. My gut tells me that a unix SQLServer would have been a the poor stepchild of the family if they had gone this rou
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
"Twenty drug approvals in the United States this year, and others in the next few years, will help replace the revenue" They make that statement at the end of the article in an almost offhand way, but no analysis I have seen for any of th
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
While the changes are often less trivial than "adding more sugar" the drug companies have been using their ability to modify drugs slightly to extend patent life. This essentially got them through the last 10 years in many cases. But for mo
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Thanks for sharing. Despite being a P&T fan for years I had never read that before.
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
I went in and skimmed, though admittedly this is outside my area of expertise. They're basically using a fluorescence technology (FRET) with a reporter attached to a tagged piece of DNA fused to the cell surface. Data capture is through ima
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Not currently. I keep meaning to start one, but the activation energy required is so high.
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Having spent over 8 years doing drug R&D I can tell you that it is most certainly not the other way around. The specific kind of chemistry you need to develop a drug (a discipline known as medicinal chemistry) is exclusively practiced
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Even accepting the premise that drug companies are dependent on all the basic research, it's but a tiny fraction of what goes into making an actual drug . Just because you know the basic biological reasons for a disease doesn't mean squat
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Since I can tell this topic is interesting to you, if you haven't read it, I highly recommend "Brain Rules" by John Medina: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0979777747/ It's a fantastic read that I think would do a much better job of discussing t
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Your example is a good one, but as others point out, the computer has been designed logically. Biology hasn't been. And even then, there's just really oddball crap that comes out of left field. I'll give you a good example (which admittedly
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
I see a big parallel with the predictions for advances in neuroscience with all the predictions that were made prior to the sequencing of the human genome (the author touches on this a bit too). Lots of smart scientists really believed that
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
I have been out of the lab for a while, but as I recall the consumables were an expensive part of PCR. Taq polymerase used to be pretty costly. Perhaps scale has caused that to come down recently? I see a lot of comments from hackers here q
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
Wow, thanks for contributing this to the thread. I had not seen this before. That has to be the best explanation of the tradeoffs/benefits of ORM I've seen anywhere. Most of the content isn't "new" in the sense that if you've done both a lo
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by JunkDNA 15y ago
This is great. While learning Scala I tried to implement a custom collection but had trouble knowing what to inherit, override, etc...

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