Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6 • Hacker News Board

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#51

Post by rdifazio » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #41

ramraj07 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always felt that if there was _any_ morally acceptable reason to harm and kill animals it is for the sake of (reasonable) medical research. In principle the ethics board is there to make sure this is true but in practice they rarely do anything about it. Perhaps the real way to solve that problem is hold the IrBs to a higher standard and make them do their job?

I always try to reverse a situation to see if it makes sense, and then I ask myself: what would we think if aliens came to earth to experiment on us with untested medicine, kill us afterwards and only when it is perfectly safe on us they would apply it to themselves. I believe a large fraction of humanity would say that that is unethical and they'd have all kinds of cognitive dissonance to deal with (and associated r…

We feel exactly the same way. Not only is it unacceptable that over 110 million animals a year are sacrificed for research, but these models do a terrible job of translating to humans and in most cases cannot even model the disease of interest but are used regardless. I used to work in tuberculosis where mice are predominantly used even though they do not get the disease and the disease they do get has the exact opposite pathology as a human.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#52

Post by debarshri » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

andrewmcewen wrote: post #48

debarshri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare to traditional reporting tools. Lot of modern day BI tools like looker for instance, do have features like this. Where do you position yours company as compared to traditional tools?

The main way that Secoda differs from a traditional reporting tool is that we offer a more complete view into the data knowledge/context of an organization. A traditional reporting tool like Looker does great for reports, but it misses context about how certain models are created, where data is coming from downstream, and more general knowledge that is stored inside of a wiki. Secoda takes all of the context across a…

This is my very naive opinion, having context of the data or report, I would perceive it as nice to have.

I would love to see some case studies or customers who attest that this actually created primary value which is kind of missing. Just an opinion.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#53

Post by rdifazio » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #18

jacquesm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On behalf of all the mice, thank you very much for doing this. I'm all for modern medicine but the number of mice, primates and other mammals that we kill in the name of science every year does not sit right with me.

I’ve always felt that if there was _any_ morally acceptable reason to harm and kill animals it is for the sake of (reasonable) medical research. In principle the ethics board is there to make sure this is true but in practice they rarely do anything about it. Perhaps the real way to solve that problem is hold the IrBs to a higher standard and make them do their job?

We agree that this would be an important step. That being said, there is a paucity of models that would make suitable replacements to animal models. People are working on this issue, but many more people need to be working on developing better in vitro systems. Even with our platform, animal models still have to be used for certain assays (e.g. ADME) but we hope that one day this will not be the case.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#54

Post by ycorvar » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

jitl wrote: post #50

ycorvar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to treatment is the most important factor in defining stroke treatment outcomes. Stroke outcomes are quantified at 90d post event with a metric called Modified Rankin Scale. The treatment strategy is defined based on the type, location, and severity. The two options we have for ischemic strokes (i.e.85% of all strokes) are TPA (clotbusting medication) and thrombectomy (catheter based mechanical removal of the cl…

I think you should further synthesize and emphasize these facts in your marketing - otherwise, the impact and importance of your work isn't apparent to laypeople.

Thank you for this insight. Communicating accurately the value is a very important aspect in what we are building.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#55

Post by ycorvar » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

dr_ wrote: post #40

ycorvar wrote: post #7

Hi there! We are Orestis and Urs from Zeit Medical ( https://www.zeitmedical.com ). We enable fast stroke detection at home. 90% of strokes go untreated due to stroke recognition delays. Many patients live in fear that a stroke might happen and go unnoticed for hours, particularly if they are asleep when it starts. Stroke is currently impossible to detect based on symptoms. Unlike a heart attack, there is no distinct…

Congrats on your launch. Question, if the device is suggesting the user may be developing a stroke - what do they do? Do they go to the ER and show the docs that there’s abnormal electrical activity so imaging of the brain must be done? Without physical symptoms, I’m not sure most ERs would be prepared to deal with this…or would they? Or is it assumed symptoms would develop by the time the patient arrives to the ER?

1) Our algos are designed to detect brain activity patterns that are associated with the onset of stroke. Detection of these patterns will send an alert to the individual, their caregivers, and 911 (can opt out).

2) The patient will present to the ED, via medical transport or in special circumstances private transport. We will perform informative sessions with the EDs that lie within our initial rollout area. The EDs will know what to expect and will perform imaging on patients arriving with our alert. Going forward, the individual will also have information on their app they will be able to show the physician, to inform them with data about our tech.

3) Most commonly symptoms develop within minutes, after the neurons are no longer receiving oxygen. In an ideal scenario treatment could be provided in the patient’s home right after the alert, but before this can happen the tech will need to have gone through additional confirmation. We are currently relying on confirmation of the stroke in the ED with the current gold standard: CT perfusion or MRI.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#56

Post by rdifazio » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #9

rdifazio wrote: post #5

Hey everyone! We’re Juliana and Robert, co-founders of Parallel Bio. We're improving drug discovery by replacing animal models, in the hope of making cures for humans, not mice. The biggest reason why 92% of new drugs fail is that drugs are currently discovered in mice, which are not realistic models of human disease but are used due to the challenges of working in humans. We've created a human ‘immune system in a di…

Exciting to hear this! Do you have any references to the type of work (if your own isn’t published) that closely resembles the organoid models you use? How finicky are these organoids to maintain? It used to be true that organoids are harder to maintain than super large mouse colonies by a long shot! What validation are you doing on your immune organoid to confirm they work correctly for the assay you’re trying to do…

There's been a lot of research around organoids but our human platform is unique. Here are two reviews discussing organoids that have been so far for the immune system, though these have almost all been done in mice (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31853049/; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32112908/).

The organoids are incredibly finicky until you figure out a culture system they like. Then it is actually very easy to maintain them. This allows us defensibility as it's hard for others to figure out but easier for us now that we have.

We've used the organoid to test 12 immunomodulators and confirmed they matched human clinical data. We also vaccinated the organoids against 8 infectious diseases and they produced a full immune response with class switching, germinal center formation, somatic hypermutation, etc. We're also in the process of using more historical controls to show that immune reactions that were missed in mice and other animals are captured in our system (e.g. there are highly inflammatory drugs that were safe in mice but deadly in people once they got to clinical trials).

By biobanking on diverse patient backgrounds, diseases are emulated in these organoids naturally. Immune disease is typically a function of dysfunctional cells that exist in a patient. By capturing an immune niche that has those cells, we have the disease-causing cells. We can confirm they emulate a disease by demonstrating a phenotype on a tissue of interest (e.g. we can make an MS immune organoid from a patient with MS and then show that the immune cells from the organoid demyelinate neurons). This should be the same for any immune disease as we continue to generate proof of concept.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#57

Post by jranieri » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

ycorvar wrote: post #7

Hi there! We are Orestis and Urs from Zeit Medical ( https://www.zeitmedical.com ). We enable fast stroke detection at home. 90% of strokes go untreated due to stroke recognition delays. Many patients live in fear that a stroke might happen and go unnoticed for hours, particularly if they are asleep when it starts. Stroke is currently impossible to detect based on symptoms. Unlike a heart attack, there is no distinct…

Best of luck to Orestis & co, they have been investigating this domain for many years and they are in a great position to find the product-market fit.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#58

Post by Mizza » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

ycorvar wrote: post #7

Hi there! We are Orestis and Urs from Zeit Medical ( https://www.zeitmedical.com ). We enable fast stroke detection at home. 90% of strokes go untreated due to stroke recognition delays. Many patients live in fear that a stroke might happen and go unnoticed for hours, particularly if they are asleep when it starts. Stroke is currently impossible to detect based on symptoms. Unlike a heart attack, there is no distinct…

Would love it if you could detect hemorrhagic vs ischemic so people at risk could keep tPA at home!

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#59

Post by rdifazio » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

whymauri wrote: post #44

rdifazio wrote: post #5

Hey everyone! We’re Juliana and Robert, co-founders of Parallel Bio. We're improving drug discovery by replacing animal models, in the hope of making cures for humans, not mice. The biggest reason why 92% of new drugs fail is that drugs are currently discovered in mice, which are not realistic models of human disease but are used due to the challenges of working in humans. We've created a human ‘immune system in a di…

Very cool and promising. Is there any literature on this "immune system in a dish", or is it ,understandably, proprietary? Three main Q: * How's reception been with med chemists? * How do you expect cost to compare with some of the individual existing immunological wet lab screens? No individual numbers, just comparative would be interesting to know. * How granular is data collection for this kinda all-in-one system,…

There are some reviews on immune organoids that I posted below. This is the first human one though able to recapitulate these features at a commercial scale.

We haven't gotten any feedback from med chemists yet! The cost is comparable to other in vitro systems and is cheaper than using animals. *The data collection can be very granular. You can use single cell techniques like flow and RNA-seq to generate high resolution data. You can also use high resolution imaging techniques like CODEX. Moving into high throughput and building predictive models is exactly where we want to go. Currently, we can generate 7500 organoids from a single donor and screen them in the thousands. We're working on building a ML pipeline along with automation so that we can screen in the hundreds of thousands if not more. Key to this though is that we have designed a platform that is amenable to this kind of automation and scale.

Re: Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #6

#60

Post by saraQOA » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

ChrisCarde wrote: post #4

This is Chris and Robert from HeyCharge ( https://heycharge.io/ ). We're developing low-cost EV charging for indoor environments like underground parking garages. Current indoor EV chargers are expensive to buy, install, and operate, especially because they need internet connections and cloud-based backends. They're also unreliable, because even if the charger's internet connection works, the user might not have one…

I love the idea! Cannot wait to have one here, as the the few charging stations are in the center of the small village where I live, so always have to park there, and pick up the charged car later...