[DIYbio] Re: DIYbio-esque App wins 1st at YC-Hacks

What do you mean by "DIYbio concepts".  Do you mean, good engineering?   Which by the way, "high school student in 30 hours with a piece of rubber, electric tape, and toilet paper" is not good engineering; good engineering would include a CAD drawing as a model suitable for manufacture.  Also, I thought "DIYbio concepts" should include by default that the solution actually does what it claims to do; rather than what is sometimes posted here as journalist-bait: performance claims made before proof, and re-invention claimed as novel.   Who were the judges of the competition and what is their criteria for 1st?  Vaporware often wins such competitions, so does an impassioned speech (vs. technical merit).  Science and good engineering typically takes longer than 30 hours.  Is it significant that a bio-related project might win such a competition?  Yes.  As part of a general trend starting sometime in the mid 1990's, the hype train has been slowly building for biotech kits and bio-monitoring/measurement, and will continue to build, especially thru newer sensors and connected computing (internet, mobile devices, cloud stuff); in general this is the slow yet inevitable convergence of many technologies long predicted by many hackers, driven by consumer demand for communications technology.  Consumer demand to be able to tweet and netflix anywhere is fueling biotech R&D, in essence.  Is it getting easier to rip off VC money with fake biotech projects?  Yes - it has always been easy - and now it is easier than ever - because nowadays people can copy & paste others' work without attribution more readily, and untrained listeners have no idea of the ripoff; such as, cloning an entire iGEM project as a VC pitch.


This is from the project's site http://clipped.me/athelaslanding/

 1. Launch the Athelas app and begin the microscopy.

2. The attached lens will magnify and focus on the sample.

3. Take the picture - and it's sent to our backend to process, count, and classify the cells. The results are then spit out.

This solution may be one of the most expensive microscopes on the market for it's optics performance since it requires a $600 smart phone to work.  Oh, it's targeted towards developing countries?  You mean, those which don't even have smart phones?

These are a couple quotes from the YC comment page.  Which basically prove that it is easy to fool the YC judges with mock science projects.

If you're asking about the competition I was in, with the "miracle device," I forgot to mention that they gave multiple examples of what it could detect. Sore throat, ear infection, etc. ... this just "magically" knew that you had Streptococcus pneumoniae or Haemophilus influenzae present--no demo, no explanation of how.

Here's what I used: http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/optical-lenses/ball-conde...

http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/optical-lenses/ball-condenser-lenses/n-bk7-ball-lenses/2041

  Basically, I took a piece of rubber, poked a hole in it, and fit the lens in. It took a couple of hours to get the positioning right but after that it worked like a charm :)    ...
The iPhone camera flash turned out to work best.

From what I remember it was an iPhone with the flash light turned on face down on the table and then a toilet paper roll on top of it with a blood sample in one of those rectangular glass things on top of the toilet paper roll with another iPhone examining it. Please correct me if I'm wrong

He said he used training data sets online to test.

There are several commercial microscopy lens solutions for iPhones now which are very good and relatively low cost.  (I don't have reference links handy, maybe someone can follow up.)


## Jonathan Cline
## jcl...@ieee.org
## Mobile: +1-805-617-0223
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On Monday, August 4, 2014 8:06:03 AM UTC-7, Will Sutton wrote:

Athelas, an iphone app to do hematology (blood imaging) won first place in a Y-Combinator hackathon this weekend. It strikes me as very DIY-esque, doing something complicated and expensive on a minimum budget.

Over in the discussion on H/N, I'm seeing a lot of poo-poo-ing of the feasibility by actual technicians.

What do you guys think: Can good ML on cheap devices increasingly replace lab tests? Also, is this a harbinger of more buy-in for DIYbio concepts from the mainstream venture community?