Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/11/25/business/corporate-business/toshiba-test-cancer-blood/

by hospes • 7 years ago

197 90 7 years ago

japantimes.co.jp

PeterisP• 7 years ago

It's kind of what Theranos promised but didn't deliver?

phire• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

That'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!

beenBoutIT2• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

The 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• 7 years ago

Reliable quantitative tests, what Theranos was promising, are significantly more difficult than screening/classification tests.

pkaye• 7 years ago

Elsewhere 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_dev5• 7 years ago

If 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.

_Microft3• 7 years ago

No, 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.

jhayward• 7 years ago

No, because you'll be telling 1 out of 20 healthy people they tested positive for cancer. Or, if it's 95% selectivity per test, which it probably is, 13 out of 20 healthy people will test positive.

astura• 7 years ago

I'd suggest reading these to get a better idea of the potential harms of screening tests in the asymptomatic population:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screeni...

https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the_screening_test_t...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-against-early-...

ska• 7 years ago

Screening techniques are a real problem if their false positive rate is high. Any significant increase in the work up rate will be a real burden on the health system (so you had better see a corresponding benefit). Worse, gold standard for follow up is going to vary by disease and location, but if it is say a biopsy and you are screening a large population you are often going to start killing people without the disease. Not many, of course, but you have to balance that against the putative improvements.

jolmg• 7 years ago

Does that translate to 5-10% chance of false-negative? Can't that be improved simply by having multiple tests with a few more drops of blood?

jobigoud• 7 years ago

90% sensitivity = 10% false negatives. When the patient has the condition, it is detected 90/100 of the time.

95% specificity = 5% false positives. When the patient doesn't have the condition, it is correctly not detected 95/100 of the time.

epmaybe• 7 years ago

What's the current sensitivity of current screening modalities at the stage that these blood tests can be used? Apologies is this is answered elsewhere in this thread.

frickinLasers• 7 years ago

Medical tests are always going to be messy, because biology is messy. It's ultimately up to the physician to order tests and interpret the results. Here's a list of tests for diagnosing breast cancer, none of which approach the numbers you are hoping for (a needle biopsy is only performed once a mass is found)

http://www.getthediagnosis.org/diagnosis/Breast_Cancer.htm

I just stumbled across this site, but you can browse by diagnosis for more numbers.

http://www.getthediagnosis.org/browse.php?mode=dx

flir• 7 years ago

CA-125 test for ovarian cancer is similar. "Best we've got", not "what we'd like to have".

buboard• 7 years ago

They should name it Notheranos

saas_sam• 7 years ago

Therayes

pen2l• 7 years ago

Here'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

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• 7 years ago

That’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• 7 years ago

Where is the photo of the founder wearing a black turtleneck? I won't believe the results until I see that.

mrinterweb• 7 years ago

This 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• 7 years ago

THERANOS IS BACK!

euske• 7 years ago

It bothers me that their control screen looks like Windows XP.

sidpatil• 7 years ago

That's because it is Windows XP.

zcrackerz• 7 years ago

Most likely some form of Windows CE, but close enough.

new299• 7 years ago

A 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• 7 years ago

This 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• 7 years ago

Not 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• 7 years ago

Don'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.

ak2172• 7 years ago

Can you please post links to the research that you mention?

hliyan• 7 years ago

This is part of the damage Theranos has done. Even when a legitimate advance comes along in the same field, people are reluctant to believe it because of the hype that Theranos created.

JackeJR• 7 years ago

Not exactly. What Theranos has done is to make clear in its aftermath why the problem of making a diagnosis from a single drop of blood is difficult. In short, the sample size is too small and may not contain biomarkers of the diseases of interest even if they are present in the body. Unless this advancement in its application can show how and why this is not a problem, there will be resistance towards accepting what is being put out without further substantiating evidence.

segfaultbuserr• 7 years ago

Jokes aside, my understanding is that diagnosing diseases using a drop of blood was once a promising and legitimate application of microfluidic & lab-on-a-chip technology and many believed it was the future. The problem of Theranos was that the company was being completely delusional about its serious limitations, and now everything that involves "a drop of blood" has a bad name afterwards.

Is there anyone who work in the related area of research? Could you give us an overview of the actual progress of the technology today? What can the technology do today? And what is the limitations?

s_m• 7 years ago

No mention of "Theranos" even once in that article.

rco8786• 7 years ago

Well this sounds familiar

earlbellinger• 7 years ago

This 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• 7 years ago

Wow 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• 7 years ago

This sounds very familiar and fishy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood:_Secrets_and_Lies_in...

stonewhite• 7 years ago

A 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• 7 years ago

Ah, 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• 7 years ago

At early stages you can simply blast it with chemo/radiation before it manifests into something intreatable though.

neuronic2• 7 years ago

Wait 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-...

teknologist• 7 years ago

It looks like it's running Windows XP.

13hunteo• 7 years ago

Sounds familiar...

pbreit• 7 years ago

Does this suggest Theranos could have been viable?

mchen076• 7 years ago

Not even remotely. These are testing for massively different things via entirely different processes.

Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood

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