Amatica Patient-centred chronic disease research

[Jonathan Edwards]

With that being said, this ignores Amatica’s larger vision, which is to include proteomics, metabolomics, genomics, and more. Does RNA analysis become “worthwhile” when it is part of a larger tapestry of biomedical data? Maybe, I don’t know. However, there are a few recent studies that have taken a very similar approach, including the 2024 NIH deep phenotyping study and the 2025 multi-omics BioMapAI study. I don’t know what this forum’s opinions are of those studies, but they seem to have produced some meaningful insights. So, I do think that Amatica’s overall vision is “worthwhile research” and thus worthy of ethical leniency.

This seems to be an almost ubiquitous philosophy in current biomedical science - measure everything and you might find something. The history of all these omics (apart from actual genomics, which gives causal data up front) is that you don't find anything very helpful. I don;t think the NIH study contributed anything useful. Productive research, from my experience, does not look like this. The research community has almost entirely lost its way, not focusing enough on what specific questions might actually provide a critical answer.

I have asked patients to pay for treatments as part of early drug studies. There is no fixed ethical objection to asking for payment but it is only ethical if the work is competent and realistic. I just don't see that here so far but am happy to be proved wrong.

 

[Dr Carrot]

So I spoke to my pal who is a neuroscientist at King’s in London, researching RNA related to dementia.

They said they didn’t see anything malicious in Amatica but a) that the data was borderline useless at present, “maybe it would be useful in 10 years time” and that b) they were surprised at how expensive the testing was, saying that “they should be paying you guys [patients] to take the tests”

 

[bspielvogel94]

This seems to be an almost ubiquitous philosophy in current biomedical science - measure everything and you might find something. The history of all these omics (apart from actual genomics, which gives causal data up front) is that you don't find anything very helpful. I don;t think the NIH study contributed anything useful. Productive research, from my experience, does not look like this. The research community has almost entirely lost its way, not focusing enough on what specific questions might actually provide a critical answer.

I have asked patients to pay for treatments as part of early drug studies. There is no fixed ethical objection to asking for payment but it is only ethical if the work is competent and realistic. I just don't see that here so far but am happy to be proved wrong.

What about Missailidis et al. multi-omics study from January 2026? The discussion on this forum seems to agree that these are intriguing/productive results.

 

[bspielvogel94]

So I spoke to my pal who is a neuroscientist at King’s in London, researching RNA related to dementia.

They said they didn’t see anything malicious in Amatica but a) that the data was borderline useless at present, “maybe it would be useful in 10 years time” and that b) they were surprised at how expensive the testing was, saying that “they should be paying you guys [patients] to take the tests”

I wholeheartedly agree that researchers should be paying patients for participation, in the same way the NIH should be allocating 100s of millions of dollars to ME/CFS research, doctors should be educated about these illnesses in med school, disability should be far easier to obtain, etc.

I'm not sure we get anywhere by arguing over what should be.