Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator

Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by mef on Thursday January 23, 2014 @11:03AM (#7108961)

Does anyone know why this approach is "viewed as a rogue project by the immunology community"? Is it just because it's new, or is there something more fundamental that conflicts with established immunology?

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by naveenspark on Thursday January 23, 2014 @11:21AM (#7109088)

Hi all, this is Naveen from Immunity Project YC team. The fact that we are using ML to identify epitopes that are the preferred targets on the virus for HIV controllers is key to what makes our project unique. This is a newer approach for developing a vaccine and therefore makes it "rogue."

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by fsniper on Thursday January 23, 2014 @12:07PM (#7109405)

By the way. That "rouge" approach is what would I have go through as a sysadmin if this was an computer related problem. I think you deserve to be a case study in immunology and be very very successful.

Sometimes thinking out of the box and letting go of established ways will lead to results.

Edit: Also in computer sciences we use differentiating between two known states to find out how to change on state to the other one perfectly. In immunology do you use similar approaches?

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by dnautics on Thursday January 23, 2014 @03:34PM (#7111007)

Hey Naveen, I know that there are some epitopes that can only be recognized if there's a weird domain swap that happens, causing antibodies to be "four-pronged" instead of "two pronged". I think it's a proline substitution in the conserved neck region. Did you screen out those epitopes from your ML?

Also good luck! I'm chipping in now. I'm relaunching my own crowd-funded nonprofit research in the biomedical space (and will be partnering with crowdhoster/crowdtilt)... I'm magnifying your message. When the dust settles a little bit I'd love to be in touch with you guys.

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by jlcx on Friday January 24, 2014 @09:34AM (#7115009)

Good luck with your relaunch! I'll look for it, so I can support it again!

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by dekhn on Thursday January 23, 2014 @12:57PM (#7109791)

I can easily find plenty of papers using ML for HIV epitope analysis.

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by kyro on Thursday January 23, 2014 @01:01PM (#7109821)

Mind linking to a few you find particularly insightful? I'm sure many of us would be more than appreciative.

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by kyro on Thursday January 23, 2014 @11:29AM (#7109130)

This sounds pretty fascinating. Do you have any links/resources that dives more in depth into this approach?

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by ajessup on Thursday January 23, 2014 @11:42AM (#7109223)

This talk at GitHub makes good watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8syV5t2_3QI&feature=youtu.be

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[deleted]

Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by gms7777 on Thursday January 23, 2014 @01:29PM (#7110042)

Yes, it stands for machine learning. The one comment I saw the phrase "Mind linking" in looks as if it was short for "Do you mind linking to...".

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Re:Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit acce... by tbarbugli on Thursday January 23, 2014 @12:22PM (#7109526)

mainly because lots of money and time got wasted in finding a vaccine. HIV vaccine would be very very risky to use thats why research is looking for a cure

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