Ask HN: What 'hard tech' company are you founding or most interested in? Where 'hard tech' is defined as requiring lots of time, money (or both) and may or may not be possible with high technical risk. I'm just really interested in people working on fixing hard problems and want to know what is out there. |
Goal: Real personalized medicine, including predicting which patients will respond to a drug, which won't respond well, and which will experience serious side-effects, based on their genetics.
We actually have a working system that can do this today: it's a new genetic analysis methodology that finds all the SNPs associated with a Gene-Environment interaction (GxE) through analysis of clinical data, and generates predictions for how other individuals will respond to the same environmental stimulus (food, drug, behavior, etc).
There's a long timeline and potentially large expenses involved in getting the right data to do drug predictions on (drug clinical trial data or EMR data), performing prospective clinical trials with the generated predictions, and finally getting FDA approval.
So we decided to start by analyzing existing NIH clinical study data (which we have access to by permission of the NIH and the respective study managers), focusing mainly on interactions between foods and nutrients (as Environment variables) and health parameters like BMI, sleep quality, cognitive measures, heart rate, etc. (as phenotype variables).
We're gearing up to launch a service that gives people access to these (and future) discoveries through analysis of their genetic data (either 23andMe or Ancestry genotype files, or whole genome sequencing that we'll offer).
Some research related to psilocybin, ibogaine, and MDMA happening, mostly in Canada. Several of those firms have gotten lots of small (<8MM USD) investments and look interesting. High risk, long-term plays.
How does one get started in this? I saw this https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/events/ai-innovati... but still don't know how I can start at small scale as a hobby.
AGI is not what I want to build, someone else can do that. For now I want to increase the capacity for people to build neural networks that researchers don’t dream of doing, as easy as stitching together web APIs. I internalize this under the title “the Infrastructure of Intelligence”
Also, eventually I would like to work on a programming language for biology, and contribute to building wetware computers.
Another thing that I think the first project would help is longitudinal health tracking and quantifying human biology.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10985 Is one, talking about using ideas like neural architecture search to build better learning systems. A lot of the references in it are golden.
I also wrote a set of notes formalizing what I see as the first step to building this infrastructure of intelligence. There’s some great references in there: https://osf.io/bv4qp/
I’d be happy to talk about this and get your thoughts, you can hit me up on my email: harshsikka123 @ Gmail.com
I’m leading a research collaboration with some researchers in academia and industry, working on this actively!
Also interstellar travel is quite hard