Ask HN: What 'hard tech' company are you founding or most interested in?

Goal: Real personalized medicine, including predicting which patients will respond to a drug, which won't respond well, and which will experience serious side-effects, based on their genetics.

We actually have a working system that can do this today: it's a new genetic analysis methodology that finds all the SNPs associated with a Gene-Environment interaction (GxE) through analysis of clinical data, and generates predictions for how other individuals will respond to the same environmental stimulus (food, drug, behavior, etc).

There's a long timeline and potentially large expenses involved in getting the right data to do drug predictions on (drug clinical trial data or EMR data), performing prospective clinical trials with the generated predictions, and finally getting FDA approval.

So we decided to start by analyzing existing NIH clinical study data (which we have access to by permission of the NIH and the respective study managers), focusing mainly on interactions between foods and nutrients (as Environment variables) and health parameters like BMI, sleep quality, cognitive measures, heart rate, etc. (as phenotype variables).

We're gearing up to launch a service that gives people access to these (and future) discoveries through analysis of their genetic data (either 23andMe or Ancestry genotype files, or whole genome sequencing that we'll offer).