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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

Looks like a great opportunity from YC and a field I wish I knew more about - especially implantable tech and wetware/biohacking.

In the embedded/IoT industry, the majority of medical device innovation is centered around home monitoring/care for older patients in nursing homes, or for preventative/medicine.

Can anyone with experience in the bio/chem/pharma startup world point to good resources where we can get up to date on the most exciting/promising new bio tech/startups of the past 20 years or so? Also related - has anything come out of Alphabet Calico [1]?

[1] https://www.calicolabs.com/

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I wrote a blog about this earlier in the week. The focus is on the opportunity in biopharma generally but i touch on some of the key technologies of the last 15 years or so

Short answer: there is a "perfect storm" of innovation right now in bio. Tech from the 2000s genomic bubble is entering the mature phase of the hype cycle and ushering in a new era of potential curative therapy (gene therapy, cell therapy, personalized medicine). Avexis, a company treating a devastating neurological disease affecting infants using gene therapy, is ky favorite example to this

There is also the more widely hyped tech, AI, wearables, synthetic bio, etc, with massive potential, but these techs haven't had much impact on patients yet

Post here: http://newbio.tech/blog.html

No-one in the field is particularly impressed with Calico at this point in time. Calico is the second coming of the Ellison Medical Foundation, which is to say they're just analyzing the details of aging and expanding on the NIH budget. Nothing they are known to be doing is likely to have the slightest impact on the progression of rejuvenation therapies.

E.g. some resources in which people are less than complimentary:

http://www.sens.org/research/research-blog/question-month-16...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603087/googles-long-stran...

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/27/15409672/go...

There are plenty of others if you want to go look for them.

Armchair opinion, probably gene editing. Not in people or animals, but I'd put money on it becoming "easy" in plants before much longer, as CRISPR gets more accurate and people apply it to already-understood micropropagation cloning strategies.

There was a startup trying to make autoluminescent plants with jellyfish genes before CRISPR even existed, just using ordinary plasmid creation and transfection techniques.[1] That particular effort failed commercially, but I believe they recently reincorporated as 'GLEAUX'.

Anyways, Biology is messy and difficult, but I really think that we are getting to a reasonably solid understanding of genetically engineering plants. And once someone turns that into a '1, 2, 3' process...well I don't think you need more than a 5-figure investment for equipment/space.

[1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

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