Personalized Medicine World Conference Recap

Personalized Medicine World Conference Recap

Double-Helix spent Monday and Tuesday at the Personalized Medicine multidisciplinary community at the Personalized Medicine World Conference (PMWC) held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA .

Great group of more than 1000 attendees attended this year.  Looks like they will need a larger venue for 2015!

The PMWC honored the CEO of Illumina, Jay Flatley, for his  leadership in fueling the advancement of personalized medicine for over 15 years.  Jay was humble and shared his award with Illumina’s 3000 employees.   Jay helped spur the adoption and growth of next generation sequencing technology like the MiSeq, HiSeq, NextSeq, and HiSeqX.

We got to hear from our friends Kim Popovits (Genomic Health), Randy Scott (InVitae), Brook Byers (KPCB), and Jay Flatley (Illumina) reflecting on the history of personalized medicine.  More than 10 years since Genomic Health  championed the personalized medicine revolution with the launch of Oncotype DX.

At at a day one presentation. Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) highlighted six personalized medicine “hot topics” for 2014:

  1. Cancer – described cancer as an area of immediate impact of genomic medicine.  NHGRI has partnered with the National Cancer Institute to develop and apply cutting edge genome science to improve cancer prevention, care and detection.
  2. Pharmacogenomics – understanding which patients will respond to specific treatment agents and those who may experience adverse events from the treatment.
  3. Clinical Applications and Care – Moving genomic medicine into clinical care settings, establishing best practices, and measuring effectiveness of care.
  4. Noninvasive prenatal and newborn genetic testing – opportunities to use genetic and genomic information in the fetal medicine space, prenatal screening, and newborn diagnosis.
  5. Information Systems – computer systems to analyze genomic information and integrate  large-scale genomic information from the laboratory,  to the physician,  and into the electronic health record.
  6. Ultra-rare disease – The NHGRI is sponsoring the sequencing of individuals who have  undiagnosed illness with the goal to diagnose and manage these undiagnosed diseases. 

Our friends from Crescendo, Agendia, Cytobank, Cypher, Syapse, Myraqa, and Stanford gave 15 minute updates in Track 2 on recent progress, studies, and developments.

We  heard very interesting presentations in Track 3 – a competition of emerging companies vying to win the “Most Promising Company Award”.  Some of the upcoming companies we got a chance to learn about included:

Ayasdi – http://www.ayasdi.com/
Carmenta – www.carmentabio.com
CellScape – www.cellscapecorp.com
HealthTell – http://www.healthtell.com/
NuMedii – http://www.healthtell.com/
Epic Sciences – www.epicsciences.com
Neurotrack – http://www.neurotrack.com/

and the winner of most promising company: T2Biosystems – www.t2biosystems.com

Panelists we spent time connecting with included Paul Hastings –  Oncomed, Maureen Cronin – CelGene ,  Bonnie Anderson – Veracyte, Brian Atwood – Versant, Paul Conley – Paladin, and others.

We didn’t have time to attend Track 4 – but this year apparently included excellent participation and discussions with patients and patient advocates – a great addition to the event.

There was also significant participation/attendance from a large number of venture funds and financial participants.

Please don’t hesitate to connect with us on our website http://www.double-helix.com or via e-mail: [email protected]

 

 

 

 

 

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