This year’s Precision Medicine World Conference (PMWC 2017 Silicon Valley) was comprised of many exciting sessions and presentations (almost 300 speakers across four tracks) in the area of next-generation sequencing, different diagnostics applications, precision medicine, big data analysis, the microbiome, large cohort studies, biobanking, and data interpretation/knowledge extraction. In addition to providing a great set of overview talks on latest developments and achievements across the health care sector, in pharma, and related to regulatory aspects, this latest rendition of PMWC also featured a government presence (the former FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf and the former Cancer Moonshot Task Force Director Greg Simon) and Elizabeth Baca (Health Advisor to Governor Brown’s Office of Planning and Research) among others that shared with the audience their respective Continue reading
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Can 2017 top 2016?
In the life sciences, 2016 brought us many significant developments, and thank goodness, it’s mostly exciting and great to talk about those in length. I am talking here about technological advancements, the many new applications next-generation sequencing is seeing, genetics moving into the clinic, precision medicine finding its mark in oncology and beyond, immunotherapy establishing itself as the leading weapon to attack cancer, and more.
The significance of these developments is further manifested with clinical omics taking shape, hospitals adopting new applications, and testing and treatments that are based on next-generation sequencing, omics data, and more. The results speak a clear language: improved diagnostic tests, and more precise therapeutics.
Here a few highlights – not an all-inclusive summary – of what made 2016 so exciting.
Next-generation sequencing matures
In 2016, we’ve reached a stage where the limitations of next-generation sequencing is not at the level of sequence data generation anymore, rather the limitations are associated Continue reading
At AGBT 2016, the Winners Are Long Reads and Whole Solutions
This year’s pilgrimage of geneticist, genomics scientists, and along with that commercial companies was to the JW Marriott in Orlando and not as usual to Marco Island – however, we were assured that the next two AGBT events are already confirmed to be held on Marco Island again. The Orlando Marriott setting seemed fine; nothing beats the Marco island environment with its beach setting which is well worth the extra hour bus ride from the airport to take you there. Having said this, the setting appeared to be more favorable for the vendors in particular, given the more open arrangement of large suites inviting easy access and interactions with conference attendees. Continue reading
At Bio-IT 2015 Big Data via Integration Platforms for Data Analysis, Patient Monitoring, and Collaboration
Last week’s Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston was attended by more than 3,000 scientists, members of the pharmaceutical industry, and subject matter experts to discuss latest requirements in data analysis, management, and storage, and in the context of all of that, cloud computing and data integration.
For me the conference started out with an excellent keynote session by Chris Sander from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center discussing on how to deliver Precision Medicine in cancer while touching upon the fantastic insights into the molecular diversity of tumors as provided in the Cancer Genome Atlas. He finished up with describing the cBioPortal which organizes data for over 20,000 tumor samples from 89 cancer studies. Following Continue reading
Looking back at AGBT 2015
This year’s meeting was in every way very much what was expected: a great set of science talks, a never ending networking event, and last but not least a product launch point. Instead of summarizing what has been written up by many other great writers and bloggers on a daily basis, here just a few highlights accompanied by the announcements that went hand-in-hand with this event. For convenience purpose, and to have it all in one place, I listed the different blog posts reflecting on AGBT 2015.
A great resource of the different AGBT activities and highlights can be found in the following blog posts written by Genohub, Pacific Biosciences, Golden Helix, DeciBio bloggers, Bio-IT World, and NextGeneSeq Report. Continue reading