The article has a DNA versus RNA spin that, scientifically, is more of a distractor than anything when it comes to cancer. I understand that for marketing, it's useful.<p>In blood cell cancers, Steve McCarroll's group has shown that oncogenic somatic DNA changes are readily discovered through routine sequencing, and these are prognostic of poor outcome.[1] If you do this on a pre-disease schedule based on the risk estimates from your first round of sequencing, you will be able to detect blood cell cancers at any stage you like.<p>In non-blood cell cancers (say, breast cancer), you don't expect to capture any of the tissue-specific cell of interest from a blood draw to determine if there are somatic mutations occurring. However, there is growing evidence that there is often enough circulating tumor DNA in the blood that it can be of diagnostic significance.[2]<p>In contrast, for diseases that do not involve somatic mutations (in other words, for diseases aside from cancer), an RNA-based assay could be quite interesting. For example, getting better characterization around non-dilated cardiomyopathies would be of broad interest.<p>1 = <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1409405" rel="nofollow">http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1409405</a><p>2 = <a href="https://www.genome.gov/27556716" rel="nofollow">https://www.genome.gov/27556716</a>
Bioinformatician here. When you say RNA testing, you mean RNA-seq? Gene expression? If yes, then do you think blood samples will be enough to make these type of diagnosis? I imagine you will probably need tissue specific samples to make some of these disease predictions.
Related: Check out Jorge Soto's talk on NPR's Ted Radio Hour:<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/</a><p>Soto is the CTO of Miroculus and they're using MicroRNA analysis to develop a cost effective way to provide early diagnosis for a variety of cancers.<p>So far they've made progress with pancreatic, breast and IIRC two others. This is huge because usually cancer is discovered when you become symptomatic which is usually stage three or worse and it's much harder to treat then.<p>If they can make this cost effective enough to be included in a regular doctor 'check up', then we may catch a large proportion of cancers early which makes treating them way easier.
So they're getting 20k from YC to get valley contacts, at the cost of a percentage of the company, when they already have pharmaceutical and NIH funding?
Or is there a different deal in place for biotechs?