Replies to post #14156 on DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[terry hallinan]

It would certainly help, although as I understand the technology that isn't going to be possible for a good long while yet. The amplification step alone takes a significant time period.

I don't know what help it would be knowing Ralph Nader or Marlo Thomas are Arab "terrorist" from their DNA. :-)

But that amplification need not take a great deal of time and might be far more accurate if one used signal amplification.

When TWTI was attempting to go public, a little matter of patent infringement threatened their very existence just as it had probably quashed a megabuck deal for the whole company to be bought out previously. TWTI sells diagnostic kits based on genomic identification using CPT (Cycling Probe Technology). IDBE never really seemed to recognize the ultimate value of CPT, doesn't today IMHO though licensing the technology saved a nearly bankrupt biotech and helped make them a small miniconglomerate in vaccines under development. IDBE's own foray into developing diagnostics was a financial disaster. Why would hospitals want to know they were responsible for superbugs infecting patients? They didn't.

I am not sure what has held up development of CPT though I realize there are technical problems in modulating the signal. Maybe it's because I don't know what I'm talking about. :-)

There is reason to really love the possibilities of what CPT might do. An online automated bioterror detector for ebola might be nice for instance. Discovering Ralph Nader is a terrorist in seconds might rate high in some places. :-)

Best, Terry

[mingwan0]

A selection of past quotes:

"By marketing our platform directly to the public, we intend to make comprehensive genotype screening solutions accessible to people all over the world via the Internet."

"Accessing of the data is going to be accomplished through the internet most likely. First of all the hospital is going to need to know where to genotype a patient, where to look in their chromosome. We will tell them from our results. Our software will be a sort of an operating system. They want to produce a test for Provacol for patients, we'll look up Provacol and see what markers they need to screen. They'll order the test kits from one of our partners, commercialization partners. They'll perform the test at their hospital and they'll have raw genetic data from the patient. Which they won't know what to do with. What they're going to do with it is use our operating system to push it through the internet, compare it against our population level solutions, and to basically classify the patient based on our results."

"The Orchid UHT can process up to 125,000 genotypes per day. More than adequate for immediate processing needs. The bottleneck is in Buccal sample preparation. That is a manual process, is time consuming, and limits overall throughput of the lab."

I believe they work 8 hour shifts so that works out at 4.3 genotypes per second or one every 0.23 seconds. Using a 171 marker test that means some 39 seconds for genotyping plus communication time plus automated buccal swab preparation (the latter would be done at the front end). That's with current technology of course. What if this was a DNA chip based solution rather than an Internet based one? We have already been told that version 3.0 will have to be chip based due to the number of markers. A number of possibilities, it just needs a bit of imagination.