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Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
- PeterisP 7y agoIt's kind of what Theranos promised but didn't deliver?
- phire 7y agoI don't think so. Theranos wanted to do any and all blood tests from a single drop of blood. Toshiba is limiting themselves to just a single kind of test, which I'm guessing the science agrees is possible with such a small blood sample.
- kasabali 7y agoThat's a good start. If they'd be able to do 13 tests from a drop of blood from each of my fingers that'd be 130 tests!
- projektfu 7y agoOuch. Give me a needle please.
- beenBoutIT 7y agoThe finger prick is an interesting non-sexual way to positively identify masochists. Everything about the finger prick takes away control while maximizing pain. A nurse can't/won't give you an arm jab until you relax your arm but they'll detonate a finger jabber randomly with an audible 'snap' while you're helplessly watching it all happen in front of you.
- hermitdev 7y agoFinger pricks aren't that bad. Ive been hospitalized several times with cyclical vomiting. It throws my entire body chemistry way off and often looks like I'm diabetic (I'm not). So, I typically get several finger pricks for blood sugar tests daily when I'm admitted. The finger pricks are nearly painless. I dont typically even notice them. Really only gets bad if they use the same finger repeatedly and bruising starts occuring. Its really not bad at all if you rotate fingers. The IV is far more painful, of course, it is also a fairly large gauge needle. I still have a track mark from my last hospital stay in my arm due to an intubated IV (a blow out) 3 months ago. It also took about 3 weeks for the swelling in my forearm to go down after that. I also get weekly allergy shots. Slightly more painful than a finger prick, but far less than a typical vaccination.
- beenBoutIT 7y agoThe problem w/ Theranos was that at first glance everything about it was physically too small. A single drop of blood is too little, the cost of running the tests was too low - to do all of the separate tests it was supposed to be able to do and still be within the realm of the possible. The Toshiba machine doing one type of test from one drop of blood at a cost of ~$184 is well within the range of what should be possible in the real world.
- bsder 7y agoThe signal to noise ratio is still devastatingly bad. Most cancers aren't throwing large amounts of detectable crap into your bloodstream. If they were, people would be doing routine cancer tests when you do things like cholesterol screening. The fact that nobody can do this with vials makes me suspicious of being able to do this with drops.
- anon946 7y agoReliable quantitative tests, what Theranos was promising, are significantly more difficult than screening/classification tests.
- pkaye 7y agoElsewhere it was mentioned it was 90% sensitivity and 95% selectivity which is not that good enough for something serious as cancer. Hopefully they can improve on it.
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoIf it's very cheap, fast and convenient, then it's enough for at least screen the population regularly. Catching only part of the cancers is quite nice already.
- _Microft 7y agoNo, not necessarily. Check out these numbers: Sensitivity is what fraction of the affected people are actually found. Here: 90%, so 10% are missed. Specificity is what fraction of the unaffected people are detected as such. Here: 95%, so 5% wrongly detected ("false positives"). In Europe, there are 60 cases of lung cancer per 100 000 people. That makes 54 correctly detected per 100 000, missing 6 cases. That also means 5000 people incorrectly suspected of lung cancer (5% of 100 000). Update: using the accuracy from the article itself, we would still get a total of 1000 of false negatives (affected but not detected) and false positives (unaffected but suspected). Incidence is still 60/100 000.
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoDamn, I knew I sucked at probabilities, but I apparently I didn't know how much.
- _Microft 7y agoWe all suck at probabilities on an intuitive level. We better do the math and take the results seriously.
- perl4ever 7y agoI think it's pretty intuitive once your attention is called to the issue. The specific numbers aren't even that important. The general principle is that a screening test for any condition that is rare compared to the error rate isn't going to be very useful due to the large number of false positives. And most severe conditions we want to know about are rare.
- buboard 7y agoThey should name it Notheranos
- claudeomusic 7y agobless you
- saas_sam 7y agoTherayes
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pen2l 7y agoHere's one paper I've found by quoted researcher, which I think is kind of relevant to the device/what this article is about: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30734558 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30734558 I think they are creating microfluidic chips that analyze miRNAs. So, I imagine it's an orchestra of pumps, valves, etc pushing very very small amounts of liquid around and using an array of techniques to detect things, all dictated by microcontrollers. It's as interdisciplinary as you can get! It should be noted that these papers are actually in great abundance, when I get happy is when a big company (e.g. Toshiba or Olympus) takes over because it means a return is to be made, i.e. they're going to pay for the patents and finally bring academic papers to fruition, and putting their weight behind it, probably make it work to solve problems like "cancer" (by detecting it super-early, making it easier to take out).
- gewa 7y agoThat’s the important point here. RNA analysis by chips or sequencing is nothing new. But there’s always a long way from the lab to the clinic, and its capital intensive to fund a startup in this field.
- dafty4 7y agoWhere is the photo of the founder wearing a black turtleneck? I won't believe the results until I see that.
- mrinterweb 7y agoThis is great. I hope this kind of screening tech, like this, becomes commonplace and highly available. Early detection could save many lives and greatly reduce later stage treatment costs.
- xivzgrev 7y agoTHERANOS IS BACK!
- euske 7y agoIt bothers me that their control screen looks like Windows XP.
- new299 7y agoA number of companies are working on cfDNA (cell free DNA) approaches to early cancer detection. GRAIL and Freenome are probably notable examples. Far fewer seem to be looking at miRNA, as Toshiba are here. I know of one other in Japan with a novel approach. If any Bioinformatics people would be interested email me and I’ll introduce them, they’re hiring.
- OliverJones 7y agoThis kind of device should join perpetual motion machines on the very short list in patent law where a working model is required as part of the patent application. In its favor is the fact that no Toshiba executive will be able to distract VCs and senior statesmen the way the top Theranos executive could.
- dannykwells 7y agoNot even in trials yet. GRAIL is running a 100K person trial, to read out next year. Also, not one paper showing this kind of prediction in the clinic, which GRAIL, freenome, Guardant etc all have. No meaningful papers published + huge claims +single drop of blood = TheranosII
- drderidder 7y agoDon't confuse a US-centric view of medical technology development, western medical journals, US trials etc with something developed in Japan. This is Toshiba, working with the (Japanese) National Cancer Center Research Institute and you can be sure there's extensive research behind it, even if it's in Japanese.
- ak217 7y agoCan you please post links to the research that you mention?
- feikname 7y ago"Planned for details of the technology will be announced at the "42nd Japan Annual Meeting of the Molecular Biology Society[5]" to be held in Fukuoka on December 3 to 8 days."[0][1] [0] https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1220546.html https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1220546.html The overview can be read in the following links: (all in japanese): Toshiba announcement[1], National Cancer Center Japan[2][3], Nedo[4] [1] https://www.toshiba.co.jp/rdc/detail/1911_06.htm https://www.toshiba.co.jp/rdc/detail/1911_06.htm [2] https://www.ncc.go.jp/jp/information/pr_release/2014/0613/index.html https://www.ncc.go.jp/jp/information/pr_release/2014/0613/in... [3] https://www.ncc.go.jp/jp/information/pr_release/2014/0613/press_release_20140613.pdf https://www.ncc.go.jp/jp/information/pr_release/2014/0613/pr... [4] https://www.nedo.go.jp/news/press/AA5_100275.html https://www.nedo.go.jp/news/press/AA5_100275.html [5] https://www2.aeplan.co.jp/mbsj2019/ https://www2.aeplan.co.jp/mbsj2019/ Also, here's the information regarding the project's funding and about the objective: https://research-er.jp/projects/view/920250 https://research-er.jp/projects/view/920250 and https://www.nedo.go.jp/activities/ZZJP_100082.html https://www.nedo.go.jp/activities/ZZJP_100082.html
- s_m 7y agoNo mention of "Theranos" even once in that article.
- rco8786 7y agoWell this sounds familiar
- gourneau 7y agoGuardant Health person here riding this top comment :) If you want to work in the cancer detection space, we have 100ish open positions. My team is looking for Python, Security, DevOps, k8s folks. https://guardanthealth.com/careers/jobs/ https://guardanthealth.com/careers/jobs/ jgourneau@guardanthealth.com
- yorwba 7y agoYou should save the job ads for the whoishiring thread next week. You definitely shouldn't attach an off-topic comment as a reply to the top comment.
- earlbellinger 7y agoThis is very exciting. I worked on these kinds of technologies a bit in graduate school (before switching gears completely and getting a PhD in astrophysics). In the coming decades, we will be able to detect who is on the path to disease before they ever begin showing any symptoms at all. Granted, curing these diseases post-detection is a whole different matter.
- tempsolution 7y agoWow maybe Toshiba is able to do what Theranos failed to do. And of course with their failure rate, they can bring up healthcare costs as well. Win win for everyone... cough
- leog0esger 7y agoThis sounds very familiar and fishy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood:_Secrets_and_Lies_in_a_Silicon_Valley_Startup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood:_Secrets_and_Lies_in...
- stonewhite 7y agoA future iteration of this product should be a household item that you use it during your morning routine, even before brushing your teeth. Preventative measures like this should be more widely available and built into peoples everyday routines.
- Gatsky 7y agoAh, we are getting ahead of ourselves. This isn't a preventative measure. It is a diagnostic device. The distinction is important because what will become increasingly apparent is we don't have good tools to deal with cancer when it is detected very early. One of the major problems is working out which of these 'detection events' is going to progress into clinically meaningful disease. We can't just take out (or even biopsy) the prostate of everyone with a hit.
- mschuster91 7y agoAt early stages you can simply blast it with chemo/radiation before it manifests into something intreatable though.
- neuronic 7y agoIf you are certain that it is malignant cancer and not one of the other billion tumor forms that may not even spread. Otherwise, you are exposing people to side effects of radiation and chemotherapy without them needing it. This is called overtreatment and sought to be avoided for a reason.
- neuronic 7y agoWait a second. That HEAVILY depends on the different aspects of detection here. For starters, mammography is not performed every year for women at any age. Why? First, you need near perfect results on 1) false AND true positives and 2) false AND true negatives. Otherwise statistics will screw your results over hard. [1] Second, the benefits need to outweigh the issues with invasive testing (taking your blood every day, 365 days, for XX years is bound to introduce some risk of infection etc...). [1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/screening-tests-and-early-detection/mammograms/limitations-of-mammograms.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/screening-tests-...
- zahreeley 7y agoIn several years means not going to happen
- teknologist 7y agoIt looks like it's running Windows XP.
- 13hunteo 7y agoSounds familiar...
- pbreit 7y agoDoes this suggest Theranos could have been viable?
- mchen076 7y agoNot even remotely. These are testing for massively different things via entirely different processes.
- bunkydoo 7y agoSo why the fuck didn't the theranos thing work?