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@PhDMarie Great to have you here! Hit me up anytime if you would like to chat or need help.
@freemo Thank you! I think I'm getting the hang of it, and I appreciate you reaching out!
@PhDMarie Looking over your profile it looks like we will have a lot in common. I am a entrepreneur myself and running a company about to go public in the next few days. It is in the biotech field. Doesnt deal directly with neuroscience from the company perspective but that is one of my interests as it indirectly inspires my development of biologically inspired algorithms (one area I focus on) and we do some AI and machine learning based on that that ultimately is at the core of the biotech I am doing.... soooo yea, probably a lot to chat about.
@PhDMarie Very cool career history there. I had a similar path although moving more from an R&D perspective than academia.
We are building a platform whereby you can identify diseases from a simple breath in rnear-realtime. We already have a successful prototype going able to identify covid with 91% accuracy. The cool thing is once we onboard more diseases the device can detect all diseases it has been trained to recognize without any additional time. So if one day we train it on 1000 diseases you will know which of those 1000 diseases you have with just a breath in minutes.
@freemo That is amazing!! With these kind of advances coming out, it is starting to feel like we live in a futuristic sci-fi world, and I am definitely here for it. I'm particularly fascinated by the potential of breath-testing technology for biomedical and other applications. I've spoken with a handful of people who are developing breath-testing technology and sample analyses in the anti-doping space (I host an anti-doping podcast), and I think it solves so many problems since it is quick, less invasive, and I was surprised how much information you can get from breath and saliva.
@PhDMarie yea the amount of data in the breath is insane, especially once you start working with sensitive enough tools to pick it up. It is all because of the lungs, it has a huge surface area so the VOC in the blood are concentrated in the lungs. Combine that with a sensative system and you can pick up biomarkers that are in very low concentrations in the blood.
Our tools and tools like it (basically just a GCMS) can distinguish almost every chemical in your breath so its just a matter of learning to detect the patterns at that point.
@freemo Very interesting! What are your thoughts on using this technology for early detection of neurodegenerative diseases? My former research was in Parkinson's disease and I did a little work in Alzheimer's disease. There are so many biological changes before clinical symptoms actually manifest. Is it looking like they may be detectable early with biomarkers that can be captured in breath?
@PhDMarie Actually that is something we discussed, specifically parkinsons (and also depression)... There are studies that suggest it **may** be possible but until we put the money into R&D to actually prove it out we cant say for certain it is viable.
@freemo That makes sense, and I'm excited about the possibilities!
@PhDMarie So are we... its a shame how expensive it is to do a study. Despite being complete non-invasive, just block into a tube, it is enormously expensive for us to get samples and really hinders things as a result.
@freemo It is frustrating how the funding situation in science limits progress. I know the US has the SBIR and STTR mechanisms that can help expedite development of new technology within companies. Do they have similar resources in the Netherlands?
@PhDMarie I am actually working out of Israel at the moment.. I want to get back to my home in the Netherlands soon though, or for that matter my home in the states I need to visit.
But, my company is for-profit, so its not the usual academic science where funding needs to come by, we have investors for that. For us the issue isnt so much finding the money as much as it is how MUCH money we have to dump into this in order to get results.. its the cost per sample that kills us.
To give you an idea in order to have enough samples to be fairly conident on our results we would need something like 1000 - 2500 samples. A sample costs us over $1000 per person, yes $1000 to pay someone to blow into a tube.. so we are talking well over a million to on board a new disease into our system.
Its paid to the hospital, which in turn covers the treatment for the patient (patients agree to participate for a discount on ttheir treatment)
@freemo @shadowsonawall Oh wow! That is expensive.
Yea its crazy, im currently trying to figure out what our budget plan is for the future and ways to work witth those sorts of costs... it isnt easy.
@shadowsonawall Well .. its a bit more complicated than that. So for starters im not sure if thats legal but even if it was that wouldn't necessarily help us.
For starters we would need a lot of billboards since we need to sample in a way that is randomized, so it cant be locked in to any one region.. im not sure the cost of the billboards would be much cheaper.
But even if we could do it we need to sample people who dont KNOW if they have the disease or not. We, afterall, want to identify the disease before someone shows obvious signs of having it, and we want to ensure we are sampling both healthy and sick from the same pool of people randomized in the same way. Billboards would kinda break that and gives us a poor sampling method.
@freemo unsolicited (apologies) but working around these kinds of issues is something I do a lot. You might strongly consider the billboard option. It's actually quite inexpensive (relative to what you're spending) to broadcast a message like that with billboards. Proper sampling would require billboards scattered all over, true, but generally a billboard costs less than $1000 so even if you average only one contact per you'd be saving money.
with regards to sampling the opposite (truly unknown) side, that sounds like a gas money kind of thing. Drive to location ABC, wander around the street asking if people would be willing to blow into a tube for science, repeat as many times/places as needed.
Likely still oversimplified but, wow - $1000 per.. 
@shadowsonawall Sounds like a great approach, but even if we could make it random sadly its a bit more complicated to get regulatory approval from that sort of a setup :)
@PhDMarie Holy typos batman!
Don't know if you are already familiar with the study, though it seems like their is a correlation between quality of sleep and onset of Alzheimer later in life.
So assuming that is the case, we could measure our sleep quality, which many already do and deduce the likelihood of it happening.
@barefootstache @freemo That is fascinating, and at the same time, it makes me worry about the quality of my sleep in a way that may impact the quality of my sleep!
@freemo Congratulations!! I look forward to hearing more! I'm a former academic faculty member who transitioned into consulting, media production, and communications, focusing on working with individuals and organizations in STEM fields. It's been an adventure, and I love learning about all the cool things others are working on.