Diagnosis and Moderation
I have been thinking about my favorite potential application of synthetic biology lately: diagnosis. I am inspired by the immune system, which can diagnose almost any disease you have already had within hours and develop an entirely new diagnoser for a novel disease within days.
Diagnosis is incredibly important. And it must be done very inexpensively and quickly. For now PCR and ELISA type assays are just too expensive and so we are more or less in the dark about the dynamics of infectious diseases. Here is a challenge: build a diagnostic kit that is easy for anyone to use that costs 10 cents and that can tell you which variety of TB your patient has: TB, MDR TB, XDR TB, or the frightening TDR TB. At this price, you can screen everyone in a community and apply the correct treatment to the people who need it, slowing the spread and development of drug resistant strains. What's the cheapest way to deploy ultrasensitive detectors? Put all the computation into a self-replicating machine: a cell. I think that's the way to go.
In looking into who is on the front lines of research into diagnosis and who might fund my crazy ideas, I realized that military doctors and researchers are doing a fair amount of this work. The ARO and ONR fund work here in addition to the NIH and in particular NAID. Most of this work is not on synthetic biology, it is on ultra-sensitive or ultra cheap ELISAs for example. On the other hand, some of the work on recreating 1918 flu, which is arguably synthetic, was funded by the army and the NIH. In any case, I really can't complain about anyone wanting to fund bio-defense related research especially on diagnostics. Such work really could save the world. I'll still go to NAID and the Gates foundation first, however.
As Rob Carlson has pointed out to me in the many recent conversations he and I have been having about military funding of biotechnology, and as he described in his book, the issues are subtle. A peacenik like me is going to be suspicious about any military involvement in anything, but I certainly don't want to stand in the way of important work that must be done to protect ourselves from one of our greatest threats: emerging infections diseases.
Diagnosis is incredibly important. And it must be done very inexpensively and quickly. For now PCR and ELISA type assays are just too expensive and so we are more or less in the dark about the dynamics of infectious diseases. Here is a challenge: build a diagnostic kit that is easy for anyone to use that costs 10 cents and that can tell you which variety of TB your patient has: TB, MDR TB, XDR TB, or the frightening TDR TB. At this price, you can screen everyone in a community and apply the correct treatment to the people who need it, slowing the spread and development of drug resistant strains. What's the cheapest way to deploy ultrasensitive detectors? Put all the computation into a self-replicating machine: a cell. I think that's the way to go.
In looking into who is on the front lines of research into diagnosis and who might fund my crazy ideas, I realized that military doctors and researchers are doing a fair amount of this work. The ARO and ONR fund work here in addition to the NIH and in particular NAID. Most of this work is not on synthetic biology, it is on ultra-sensitive or ultra cheap ELISAs for example. On the other hand, some of the work on recreating 1918 flu, which is arguably synthetic, was funded by the army and the NIH. In any case, I really can't complain about anyone wanting to fund bio-defense related research especially on diagnostics. Such work really could save the world. I'll still go to NAID and the Gates foundation first, however.
As Rob Carlson has pointed out to me in the many recent conversations he and I have been having about military funding of biotechnology, and as he described in his book, the issues are subtle. A peacenik like me is going to be suspicious about any military involvement in anything, but I certainly don't want to stand in the way of important work that must be done to protect ourselves from one of our greatest threats: emerging infections diseases.
posted by Eric Klavins at
9:07 AM
1 Comments:
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Susan
Cure for Sweaty Feet
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