[jcr]

Hi Julia, thanks for answering questions.

I noticed something odd in the techcrunch article; the author, Sarah Buhr (@sarahbuhr), capitalized your company name incorrectly as "IxChel" in the article title. I fixed the capitalization after submitting this to HN, and dang (Dan) or another HN admin most likely fixed the "YC-backed" to the usual "(YC S15)". You might want to ask techcrunch to fix it?

I have not (yet) read the linked papers in your site:

http://ixchelsci.com/#publications

Which I hope will provide more details, but at the moment, I'm curious how your whole system/service works?

[jkirshner]

Our platform is a cell-based laboratory tool where we reconstruct the environment of human organs in a dish. When cells are placed in these physiological conditions, they behave the way they would behave in the human body (unlike the conventional models where cells are grown on a surface of plastic dishes). Such set-up allows us to evaluate how cancer cells will respond to drugs (or drug combinations) under native conditions of drug-resistance. I.e. when cancer cells interact with their environment in the human organs, this environment protects them against chemotherapy and other drugs, so when cells are taken out of their physiological environment, they become more sensitive to drugs. This results in a false assumption that the drug has anti-cancer activity, but when it's introduced into a patient, the drug doesn't work.

What we provide, is a system where drugs can be tested under the conditions similar to those seen by the cancer cells in the human.

What we are offering right now, are services to test drugs in our system, and we are gearing-up to provide all-inclusive kits that can be used by researchers to run these assays in their own labs.

Please let us know if you would like know things in more detail.

[jcr]

The link on your site to the SPIE Journal of Biomedical Optics paper is paywalled [1], but the paper is freely available from NIH [2]. You might want to change the link on your site, or just add NIH link(s) as backups (I also found [3] on NIH).

So far, I've only read through the abstract, but the use of Raman spectroscopy [4] for identification looks fascinating. I had no clue that it's possible to differentiate cancer cells with a spectrograph, and no, I really have no idea how or why the analysis works. On the other hand, automating test equipment in a lab is a whole lot of fun!

At the moment, the closest thing I can manage to a useful question is: Can/Will/Does your service automate this analysis method?

[1] http://biomedicaloptics.spiedigitallibrary.org/mobile/articl...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832300/

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC141028/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_spectroscopy

[jkirshner]

Thanks for the suggestion, we will add the links to the NIH repository for the papers that are available.

Regarding automation, the Raman spectroscopy studies was done in collaboration with a colleague at Purdue University, so at the moment, we don't have plans to extend these studies.

However, we are working on automating our workflow to streamline the set-up and analysis of our cultures. So, if you know anyone working on bio lab-related automation, we'd love an intro.

[jkirshner]

Thanks! I asked TechCrunch to fix the company name.