Precision medicine continues to progress immensely in the last decade and these successes have enabled the identification of therapeutic strategies more accurately for patients than ever. Our 5th Annual Precision Medicine conference program will once
again bring together experts in the field to share their knowledge and approaches in moving precision medicine toward routine practice. We will showcase cutting edge technologies and workflow on how to implement precision medicine in clinical settings
and not just research focus. We will examine the different approaches in phenotyping patients based on EMR data and other AI-driven technologies. Other diseases beyond oncology will also be discussed.
Final Agenda
Monday, March 2
10:30 Conference Program Registration Open
11:45 Organizer’s Opening Remarks
Ngoc ‘Emily’ Le, PhD, Conference Producer, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
11:50 Chairperson’s Remarks
Ralph Snyderman, MD, Chancellor Emeritus, Duke University; Director, Duke Center for Personalized Health Care
11:55 FEATURED PRESENTATION: The Precision Health Care Revolution – From Now into the Future
Ralph Snyderman, MD, Chancellor Emeritus, Duke University; Director, Duke Center for Personalized Health Care
Personalized, precision health is forging a transformation in care from its current focus on one-size-fits-all treatment for established diseases to a personalized, predictive approach that improves health, prevents disease, and treats it precisely when
it occurs. This allows personalized care for each individual’s specific needs. This field is driven by the explosive development of capabilities stemming from genomic technologies, targeted therapies, digital and mobile health technologies,
big data collection, artificial intelligence, and clinical awareness of personalized, proactive, patient-driven approaches to care. The harmonization of the new technologies with effective clinical application is a great challenge, but an even greater
opportunity.
12:25
pm NEW: AI-Enabled Precision Medicine in Clinical Decision Support and Point-of-Care Diagnosis
Matthew Lungren, MD, MPH, Associate Director, Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging, Stanford Child Health Research Institute; Faculty Scholar; Assistant Professor of Radiology, Radiology, Stanford University, School
of Medicine, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
Can machine learning help all clinicians achieve expert-level diagnosis and patient-specific risk predictions at the point of care? We will explore frame-shifting research that opens new approaches to care delivery in a precision medicine paradigm while
also discussing some of the pitfalls and lessons learned from our field-leading medical AI work at Stanford with partner institutions all over the world. Presentation delivered via a live, interactive video
conferencing platform.
12:55 Session Break
1:05 Luncheon Presentation I: Accelerate Assay Adoption
by Partnering with a Proven Leader in Instrumentation
Bernard Andruss, PhD, Senior Vice President, Operations
and Regulatory Affairs, Asuragen, Inc.
Searching for a platform partner to meet your assay commercialization needs? Come learn about how working with Thermo Fisher Scientific, a proven leader in instrumentation, can accelerate test adoption in your target markets. Leverage the
strength of Thermo Fisher's nucleic acid extraction, PCR, qPCR, Capillary Electrophoresis, microarray and Next Generation Sequencing platforms. Partnership models include reagent rental agreements and private label options.
1:35 Luncheon Presentation II (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)
2:05 Session Break
2:20 Chairperson’s Remarks
Kenna R. Mills-Shaw, PhD, Executive Director, Khalifa Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, MD Anderson Cancer Center
2:25 Machine Learning for Identifying Phenotypes in Electronic Health Records
Marylyn D. Ritchie, PhD, Professor, Genetics; Director, Center for Translational Bioinformatics, Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI); Associate Director for Bioinformatics, Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI); Associate Director, Penn
Center
for Precision Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine
Comprehensive collections of phenotypic data can be used in more integrated ways to better subset or stratify patients based on the totality of his or her health information. Through applying machine learning to the rich phenotypic data of the EHR, these
data can be mined to identify new and interesting patterns of disease expression and relationships. We have been exploring machine learning technologies for evaluating the phenomic landscape to improve our understanding of complex traits. These techniques
show great promise for the future of precision medicine.
2:55 Electronic Health Records and Computable Phenotyping Strategies
Dana C. Crawford, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, Case Western Reserve University
Electronic health records capture individual-level data related to clinical care including medical history, diagnoses, medications, laboratory measures, and social history. While the recording of these data is intended for clinical care and billing, they
can be repurposed for precision medicine research albeit with some limitations. In this session, strategies to access these data to extract research-grade variables will be discussed, including common rules-based approaches and more recent computable
phenotyping approaches that leverage known genetic relationships to human diseases and traits.
3:25 Precision Cancer Medicine: Neither Silver Bullet nor an Illusion
Kenna R. Mills-Shaw, PhD,
Executive Director, Khalifa Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, MD Anderson Cancer Center
Precision oncology is neither an illusion nor is it a panacea. Precision oncology has routinely been utilized in subsets of specific molecularly defined tumors to elicit dramatic and sometimes durable responses. As novel drugs enter clinical trials based
on emerging biological discoveries, implementation of precision oncology grows into an unmanageable feat without a highly integrated decision support platform that is both proactive, providing timely updates, as well as responsive to the changing
clinical landscape. This talk will discuss how decision support can be a necessary transformative force for precision oncology, ultimately resulting in systematic improvements in clinical care and improvements in patient outcome. Read a recent article published in Diagnostics World
3:55 The Role of Liquid Biopsy in Precision Medicine: Where are we Today?
Daniel Simon, PhD, Senior Vice President, Bio Pharma Partnerships, Guardant Health
The demonstrated clinical utility of liquid biopsy has driven it's widespread adoption in the clinic. As precision oncology continues to evolve, how is the role of liquid biopsy changing?
4:25 Refreshment Break and Transition to Plenary Keynote
4:35 Welcome Remarks
Cindy Crowninshield, RDN, LDN, HHC, Executive Event Director, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
4:45 PLENARY KEYNOTE INTRODUCTION
Thomas Westerling-Bui, PhD, Senior Scientist, Regional Business Development, Aiforia
5:00 PLENARY KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: High-Performance Medicine
Eric Topol, MD, Founder and Director, Scripps Research Translational Institute (SRTI); Author, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence
Can Make Healthcare Human Again
6:00 Grand Opening Reception in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing, Speed Networking, Book Signing, and Meetup Group
7:30 End of Day
Tuesday, March 3
7:30 am Registration Open and Morning Coffee
8:00 Organizer’s Remarks
Ngoc ‘Emily’ Le, PhD, Conference Producer, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
8:05 Chairperson’s Remarks
Karl V. Voelkerding, MD, Professor, Pathology, University of Utah; Medical Director for Genomics and Bioinformatics, ARUP Laboratories
8:10 Maximizing Genomics for Obtaining Clinically Relevant Information in Adult and Pediatric Cancers
Helen Fernandes,
PhD, Co-Director Genomic Oncology, Laboratory of Personalized Genomic Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center
Genomic tests for precision oncology range from interrogation of nucleic acids in single genes to whole exome and whole genome. Successful implementation of validated assays in a clinical setting is often determined by outcome measures. Selecting the
appropriate test that provides information that is relevant to patient management in a time and cost-effective manner is essential for the viability of personalized genomics. In this session, we will discuss optimal utilization of hotspot panels,
versus large targeted panels and whole exome sequencing. Case studies will be utilized to illustrate the efficacy of each panel in the management of adult and pediatric cancers.
8:40 Rapid Genomic Sequencing-Based Diagnosis in Critically Ill Newborns
Stephen Kingsmore, MD, DSc, President/CEO, Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine
This presentation will describe how rapid genomic sequencing-based approaches coupled with advanced data analytics are being applied to yield molecular diagnoses in critically ill newborns suspected of having genetic disorders. Also discussed will be
how these approaches are being collaboratively applied in a network of additional hospital centers in California through the Baby Bear project.
9:10 The All of Us Research Program: Advancing Precision Health for All
Mitchell R. Lunn, MD, MAS, FASN, Assistant Professor, Medicine; Co-Director, The PRIDE Study, Stanford University School of Medicine
NIH’s All of Us Research Program, launched nationally in May 2018, is working to build the largest, most diverse research resource of its kind to accelerate biomedical discoveries and advance precision medicine. The program aims to enroll one million
or more participants across the country, with a special focus on engaging populations that are historically underrepresented in research. This presentation will provide an overview of the program, an update on its progress to date, and information
about the data and tools that will be broadly accessible to researchers for a wide range of studies.
9:40 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing, Speed Networking, Book Signing, and Meetup Group
10:40 Chairperson’s Remarks
Keith L. Ligon, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Pathology, Harvard Medical School; Associate Pathologist and Neuropathologist, Pathology; Director, DFCI Center for Patient Derived Models, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
10:45 Translating Ten Trillion Points of Data into Diagnostics, Therapies and New Insights in Health and Disease
Atul Butte, MD, PhD, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor; Director, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco; Chief Data Scientist, University of California Health (UC Health)
We build and apply tools that convert trillions of points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data – measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade and now commonly termed “big data” – into diagnostics, therapeutics,
and new insights into disease. Dr. Butte, a computer scientist and pediatrician, will highlight his center’s recent work on integrating electronic health records data across the entire University of California, and how analytics on this “real
world data” can lead to new evidence for drug efficacy, new savings from better medication choices, and new methods to teach intelligence – real and artificial – to more precisely practice medicine.
11:15 Using Networks to Decode Cancer Risk
John Quackenbush, PhD, Professor and Chair, Biostatistics, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
Precision medicine is based on the idea that single mutations can inform our understanding of disease and response to therapy. But we know that cancer is multifactorial, with many genetic variants moderating disease and disease risk. By using network
methods, we can better understand how and why cancer develops and assess disease risk.
11:45 Machine Learning-Based Patient Subgroup Identification for Precision Medicine
Jie Cheng, PhD, Director, Exploratory Statistics, Abbvie
Central to precision medicine is the ability to detect patient subgroups with differential treatment effects in clinical trial datasets. These patient subgroups are defined by clinical variables and biomarkers. We will provide a brief overview of
existing methods for patient subgroup identification and then present our novel approach. The performance of our method is evaluated against other state-of-the-art methods using both simulation and real-world clinical trial dataset
12:15 pm Session Break
12:20 LUNCHEON PRESENTATION I: A Modern Molecular LIMS Built for Precision Medicine
Nabil Hafez, MS, Senior Director, Product Management, Precision Medicine, Sunquest Information Systems
With the advent of precision medicine, molecular labs are facing greater testing demand than ever before. Molecular diagnostics are complicated, rapidly changing, and subject to detailed regulatory auditing. Learn how modern labs are streamlining
molecular testing, scaling for volume and growth, and mastering compliance with purpose-built LIMS technology.
12:50 Luncheon Presentation II (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)
1:20 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing, Speed Networking, Book Signing, and Meetup Group
2:00 Breakout Discussions in the Exhibit Hall (please click here for details)
3:00 Transition to Keynote Session
3:15 Organizer’s Remarks
Christina Lingham, Executive Director, Conferences and Fellow, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
3:20 Keynote Introduction
Allison Mallory, PhD, Director, R&D Molecular Biology, Stilla Technologies
3:35 What Does the New Era of Genomic Medicine Look Like? Effects on Patient Care, Therapeutics, and Diagnostics
20 years after the completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Project, there is compelling evidence of genomics delivering the rich promise of precision medicine. There have been major advances in the throughput and affordability of genome
sequencing, enhanced tools for genome analysis and interpretation, new paradigms for therapeutics and strong signs of clinical benefit using genome editing. But major challenges remain. In this special plenary roundtable, three established pioneers
of genomic medicine – David Haussler, Stephen Kingsmore, and Liz Worthey – offer their insights on the extraordinary advances in genomic medicine over the past 1-2 decades and share their hopes and concerns for the future of our field.
Moderator: Kevin Davies, PhD, Executive Editor, The CRISPR Journal, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Panelists: Stephen Kingsmore, MD, DSc, President/CEO, Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine
David Haussler, PhD, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Distinguished Professor, Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz; Scientific Director, UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute; Scientific Co-Director, California
Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3)
Elizabeth Worthey, PhD, Director, Genomic Medicine, University of Alabama, Birmingham School of Medicine
4:50 Spring Fling Celebration in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing, Speed Networking, Book Signing, and Meetup Group
6:00 End of Day
Wednesday, March 4
6:45 am Registration Open
7:00 BREAKFAST PANEL DISCUSSION: The Time is NOW: Creating Meaningful Change for Women in the Workplace (Sponsorship Opportunity Available)
(please see Women in Science page for details)
Moderator: Robin Toft, Author
of WE CAN, The Executive Woman’s Guide to Career Advancement; Founder and Chairman, Toft Group Executive Search
Panelists: Camille Samuels, MBA, Partner, Venrock
Paul Hastings, President and CEO, Nkarta Therapeutics, Inc
Teresa L. Wright, MD, Staff Physician, Medicine, San Francisco Veterans Administration
8:00 Organizer’s Remarks
Marina Filshtinsky, MD, Executive Director, Conferences, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
8:05 Chairperson’s Remarks
Khosrow R. Shotorbani, President, Executive Director, Project Santa Fe Foundation
8:10 NEW: Paradigms for MolDX Coverage
Gabriel Bien-Willner, MD, PhD, Medical Director, Moldx, Palmetto GBA
This talk will address the LCD process and how this process is implemented for molecular diagnostic testing by MolDX and its partner MACs. This presentation will review the information that is required for technical assessment and how this relates
to a new LCD request or to coverage under an existing LCD. We will review MolDX’s approach to evidence evaluation, including the ACCE model process and chains of evidence.
8:25 NEW: Humana’s Perspective on Personalized Medicine
Kristine Bordenave, MD, FACP, Former Corporate Medical Director, Humana
This presentation will explore the impact of coverage of genetic testing on precision medicine, and payment considerations based on these relationships.
8:40 NEW: Navigating the Reimbursement Landscape in the Era of Precision Medicine
Shivang Doshi, Director, Boston Healthcare Associates, Inc.
The increasing complexity of cancer care and accelerated approvals of targeted and immuno-oncology therapies has shifted CDx testing from a one test-one drug approach to a next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based multi-gene approach. Despite recent
improvements, coverage and reimbursement remains fragmented and challenging for NGS testing.
8:55 PANEL DISCUSSION: Coverage and Reimbursement of Advanced Diagnostics
As healthcare is transitioning from “sick” care to “well” care and shifting from fee-for-service to value-based models, it’s essential that we develop evidence to demonstrate the new value of the laboratory for optimized
reimbursement.
Topics to be discussed:
- Understand how to define and measure value using appropriate KPIs to help influence reimbursement policy.
- Learn ways to survive financially as payment models shift and reimbursement is driven by outcomes and risk with potential upside depending upon the reimbursement model.
- Explore key partnership opportunities that are aligned with the changes in healthcare to help shape value.
Moderator: Khosrow R. Shotorbani, President, Executive Director, Project Santa Fe Foundation
Panelists: Gabriel Bien-Willner, MD, PhD, Medical Director, Moldx, Palmetto GBA
Kristine Bordenave, MD, FACP, Former Corporate Medical Director, Humana
Lon Castle, CMO, Molecular Genetics and Personalized Medicine, eviCore Healthcare
Shivang Doshi, Director, Boston Healthcare Associates, Inc.
9:40 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Poster Viewing, Speed Networking, Book Signing, and Meetup Group
10:40 Functional Precision Medicine in Brain Tumors and Other Cancers
Keith L. Ligon, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Pathology, Harvard Medical School; Associate Pathologist and Neuropathologist, Pathology; Director, DFCI Center for Patient Derived Models, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
We have developed large-scale cohorts of novel patient-derived cell lines (3D) and xenografts which represent the wide spectrum of phenotypes and genotypes seen in the diseases. We also developed large-scale pharmacogenomic screening approaches
to prioritize the genotypes most responsive to such therapies and developed acute sensitivity assays based on novel biomarkers of mass and imaging to assess individual patient samples freshly derived from patients enrol-ling in clinical trials
and standard of care therapy. Such acute sensitivity assays show reliable results for individual patients for both diagnosis and also represent novel approaches to genera-tion of early-phase human evaluation of novel drugs in clinical trials
and can shorten the time frame of data generation and lower costs for clinical trials in these diseases.
11:10 Leveraging Tumor Organoids for Functional Precision Medicine Applications
Alice Soragni, PhD, Assistant Professor, Orthopaedic Surgery, University of California Los Angeles
We have established a pipeline to process clinical samples obtained from tumor resection sur-geries, develop tumor organoid models with success rates above 90% and perform high-throughput drug screenings. We take advantage of our ring approach
that uses a modified ge-ometry to facilitate and automate changing media, adding drugs and performing assays (Phan et al, 2019). Our methodology allows us to successfully obtain and perform large drug screenings for various tumors, including
low-grade tumors or heavily pre-treated tumors, which are typi-cally refractory to grow in immunocompromised mice as patient-derived xenografts.
11:40 A Hybrid Genomic/Phenomic Approach to Personalizing Cancer Therapies
Clifford Reid, PhD, Founder and CEO, Travera
To make the wealth of genomic information broadly useful for patient care, we propose a new approach to identifying effective therapies for patients who have driver mutations in cancer genes but no FDA-approved matching therapies. First, we use
genomics to identify a set of candidate drugs though cancer pathway analysis: we identify which pathways the patient’s mutations affect, and then identify the existing FDA-approved drugs that work on those pathways. Second, we use phenotypic
testing to identify the subset of the candidate drugs that are most likely to be effective in the patient: we test each candidate drug ex vivo against the patient’s live cancer cells and identify the
high-response drugs.
12:10 pm Sponsored Presentation (Opportunity Available)
12:40 Session Break
12:50 PRECISION HEALTH LUNCHEON PRESENTATION: Validation of A Next Generation Sequencing Gene Panel for Detection of Variants in Plasma Total Nucleic Acid
Xin-Xing Tan, PhD, Principal Scientist, Molecular, NeoGenomics Laboratories, Inc.
Liquid biopsy next generation sequencing (NGS) gene panel assays provide a powerful non-invasive tool to detect tumor-derived variants for clinic diagnostics in a massively parallel manner. We present here a NGS assay designed specifically
for liquid biopsy clinical applications, and its analytical and clinical validation to assess accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, repeatability, and reproducibility, etc.
1:20 Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall with Last Chance Poster Viewing, Speed Networking, Book Signing, and Meetup Group
2:00 Chairperson’s Remarks
Hsueh-Chia Chang, PhD, Bayer Corporation Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Notre Dame
2:05 Diagnosing Disease with Rare Circulating EVs: Finding Heterogeneous, Nanoscale Needles in a Nanoscale Haystack
David A. Issadore, PhD, Assistant Professor, Bioengineering & Electrical & Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania
We developed a multichannel nanofluidic system to analyze crude clinical samples. Using this platform, we isolated EVs, profile the RNA cargo inside of these EVs, and apply a machine learning algorithm to generate predictive panels that could
provide useful diagnostics for applications in traumatic brain injury and pancreatic cancer using both murine models and clinical samples.
2:35 Isolation/Fractionation of Blood Exosomes and Profiling of Exosomal miRNA for Precision Medicine Application
Hsueh-Chia Chang, PhD, Bayer Corporation Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Notre Dame
We present two nanofluidic technologies for high-yield and high-throughput fractionation of nanoparticles carriers in blood, like exosomes, lipoproteins and ribonucleoproteins, which carry most of the extracellular RNAs. Both use asymmetric nanopore
membranes (ANM) that are asymmetrically etched from ion-track membranes. ANM allows high throughput (>5 ml/hour) isolation of nanoparticles of specific size range by nanofiltration, without lysing or coalescence and with high purity (low
protein content). It also allows high-yield nano-magnetic bead capture of particles with specific surface antigens.
3:05 Precision Microfluidic Medicine: From Single Cell Analysis and to Single Cell Engineering for Cell-Based Theranostics
Abraham “Abe” P. Lee, Professor, Biomedical Engineering; Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering; Director, NSF I/UCRC, University of California at Irvine
We present a microfluidic trapping array which is able to rapidly and deterministically trap single cells in highly-packed microwells. As the single-cell trapping efficiency is determined by the channel design instead of the flow rate, this trapping
array can be coupled with different microfluidic sample processing units with different flow rates for various single-cell analyses.
3:35 Close of Conference