Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms • Hacker News Board

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#31

Post by mswen » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

chuie wrote: post #25

mswen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't currently have access to those publications and not willing to pay just to read these articles but from the titles, abstracts and citations it sounds like basically you are taking a systems biology and GWAS approach? The Institute for Systems Biology has been around since 2000. I remember interviewing people in an internal systems biology group at one of the largest pharma companies in the world in 2004 and w…

Keep in mind that this article was not written by the founders of Verge Genomics, but by a journalist who "writes about internet culture, social networks, and consumer-facing technology." So they are probably going to use speech that will make the more science/biotech literate person bristle.

That was my first thought - my other comment put the initial onus on the journalist for creating a strawman opponent. However, when writing my second comment with a little history of systems biology - including within large pharma - I thought I should go watch the video. The founders basically say the same kind of stuff in their video. So we cannot blame it all on the journalist.

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#32

Post by w1ntermute » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

sethbannon wrote: post #29

w1ntermute wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your article employs the same sort of breathless rhetoric as TechCrunch: > A smart software developer can build and launch a web or mobile app and get paying customers for under $2,000. The same will soon be true for biotechnology. Moore's law is a unique phenomenon, and it most certainly does not apply in biotech.

It's true that Moore's law doesn't apply everywhere. In fact, some costs (like the costs of sequencing a human genome) are falling much faster than Moore's law would predict: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/DNA_Sequ...

1. That graph completely omits the quality of the sequence data being generated (hint: it's pretty terrible).

2. Hyping up cheaper sequencing the way you are is nothing more than what Sydney Brenner referred to as "low-input, high-throughput, no-output biology" (video source: http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-geno...). Also see: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomi...

3. Here's a more useful Moore's law derivative that's seen in the life sciences: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#33

Post by w1ntermute » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

chuie wrote: post #23

mswen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't

I'm going to presume that I don't really understand the company then, because the founders and advisers should certainly know more than I do about drug discovery.

> the founders and advisers should certainly know more than I do about drug discovery

Unfortunately, the operative word here appears to be "should."

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#34

Post by chuie » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 9:45 PM UTC

mswen wrote: post #31

chuie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that this article was not written by the founders of Verge Genomics, but by a journalist who "writes about internet culture, social networks, and consumer-facing technology." So they are probably going to use speech that will make the more science/biotech literate person bristle.

That was my first thought - my other comment put the initial onus on the journalist for creating a strawman opponent. However, when writing my second comment with a little history of systems biology - including within large pharma - I thought I should go watch the video. The founders basically say the same kind of stuff in their video. So we cannot blame it all on the journalist.

Ahh, I should have watched the video before I had the knee-jerk reaction to be so charitable. They could have just done what grad students are basically trained to do: use your narrow expertise to bullshit people and tie in some buzzwords that grant funding agencies like to hear. I hope I am just being cynical and that YC knows what they are doing here.

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#35

Post by timr » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 9:53 PM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #32

sethbannon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that Moore's law doesn't apply everywhere. In fact, some costs (like the costs of sequencing a human genome) are falling much faster than Moore's law would predict: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/DNA_Sequ...

1. That graph completely omits the quality of the sequence data being generated (hint: it's pretty terrible). 2. Hyping up cheaper sequencing the way you are is nothing more than what Sydney Brenner referred to as "low-input, high-throughput, no-output biology" (video source: http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-geno... ). Also see: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomi... 3.…

Wow. That last chart is really damning. It goes a long way to explaining why biotech has been such a moribund area of investment.

You can sequence as fast and as cheaply as you like, but the big-O on biological research is not our ability to generate DNA sequences.

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#36

Post by bbgm » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 10:18 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #17

w1ntermute wrote: post #5

The breathless tone of this TechCrunch article reminds me of this commentary on Atomwise (also a YC biotech): http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2015/03/26/tone_it_down... In my opinion, YC has no idea what they're doing in biotech. Here's a much more credible neuro disease startup that was recently launched: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/05/14/former-... I'm sure Alice and Jason are very intellige…

The biotech companies in the last batch were mostly reasonable, if a little too breathlessly overhyped by their press launches. Say what you will about that Atomwise article, they're playing in a well-known space. There are existing companies (generally small) selling exactly that sort of service to drug companies. It's an open question whether or not their particular approach is sufficiently better to give them a su…

The thing is this kind of idea is not new. Finding new targets is hard science that needs a ton of experiments to validate that your theoretical models even work. For now this is low risk and no cost to the pharma partner, but it's a not a new model and in my experience not one that works.

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#37

Post by bbgm » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

lvs wrote: post #6

> But Verge Genomics is able to cure brain diseases 1000x more quickly than big pharma by using algorithms Guffaw. Tech journalism at its finest. The company sounds great, but I'm not sure Techcrunch is really doing them a lot of favors by just making stuff up.

My biggest fear is that the folks at YC actually believe claims like that.

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#38

Post by timr » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

bbgm wrote: post #36

timr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biotech companies in the last batch were mostly reasonable, if a little too breathlessly overhyped by their press launches. Say what you will about that Atomwise article, they're playing in a well-known space. There are existing companies (generally small) selling exactly that sort of service to drug companies. It's an open question whether or not their particular approach is sufficiently better to give them a su…

The thing is this kind of idea is not new. Finding new targets is hard science that needs a ton of experiments to validate that your theoretical models even work. For now this is low risk and no cost to the pharma partner, but it's a not a new model and in my experience not one that works.

"The thing is this kind of idea is not new."

...most startup companies aren't doing anything new. How many different food-delivery services has YC funded? Photo-sharing services? Video startups? AirBnB wasn't anything new in 2007, either. Dropbox was criticized because everyone knew that file sharing had been done before.

This goes back to what I was saying about biotech being stodgy: the one thing the software industry has going for it is that it's willing to fling seed capital at re-tread ideas. If success is mostly about being in the right place for luck to occur, then the secret is putting enough companies in a place to experience luck. I think that's basically what YC does.

So-called "biotech investors" tend to want to wait around for commercially ready tech to just fall out of academic labs, so that they can avoid putting any investment at all into R&D. There are probably a lot of inexperienced teams that could make a business in biotech if only they had access to cash.

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#39

Post by bbgm » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 10:28 PM UTC

chuie wrote: post #13

I have a hard time believing that large pharma research labs are limiting themselves to single loci for a given disease phenotype. But if they are, it makes sense why YC would see value in this.

They haven't for a while. Some of the claims, at least in this story, are way over the top.

Re: Verge Genomics (YC S15) Wants to Cure Neurodegenerative Diseases with Algorithms

#40

Post by gmarx » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 10:30 PM UTC

searine wrote: post #11

Genomic vapor ware. When will people understand the problem with genomics isn't complexity, it is a lack of raw data. We simply have not collected enough annotation on what every gene does and how it interacts. Without that information, you have diddly-squat.

it might be fairer to say that before we even get to the complexity problem we have to solve the raw data problem.