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November 27, 2017 | The Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference will celebrate its 25^th anniversary next February in San Francisco*. Originally three, separate, back-to back conferences covering the Human Genome Project; genetic screening and diagnosis; and genomic partnering, Tri-Con quickly outgrew the three-conference blueprint. But the name stuck.

This year, the program is worthy of a 25^th anniversary celebration. Here are a few of the talks we’ve marked so far—and we’re still perusing the program.

--The Editors

Plenary Program

In honor of Tri-Con’s 25th anniversary, Leroy Hood and David Haussler, both of whom had a seminal role in the HGP, will give plenary addresses. Hood’s career has been spent chasing the advice of his mentor William J. Dreyer: “If you want to practice biology, do it on the leading edge, and if you want to be on the leading edge, invent new tools for deciphering biological information.” And he’s done that over a rich and innovative career. Now Hood is pioneering new approaches to P4 medicine—medicine that is predictive, personalized, preventative, and participatory. Most recently, has embarked on creating a P4 pilot project on 108 well individuals, hoping to create a new healthcare discipline termed scientific wellness.

Haussler has built his career advocating and creating avenues for open science. As a collaborator on the international Human Genome Project, his team posted the first publicly available computational assembly of the human genome sequence on the Internet on July 7, 2000. He’s subsequently been part of the creation of the UCSC Genome Browser, the Ensembl platform, the CGHub database to hold NCI’s cancer genome data, and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).

Also on the plenary agenda: Sara Radcliffe, president & CEO of the California Life Sciences Association, will give a state of the industry report on cancer research. And a panel of industry leaders will participate in a lightning round of presentations on emerging and hot technologies in molecular medicine. Each will present a clinical problem and how new technologies are helping us solve it.

Sessions Galore

In liquid biopsy development, Stefanie Jeffrey, Stanford University School of Medicine, chairs a session on Tuesday, February 13 kicking off with a featured presentation on circulating tumor cells from Jonathan Uhr, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Brian Kirby, Weill Cornell Medical College, will present devices for manipulating and sorting extracellular shed nanometer-scale vesicles in microfluidic devices, and discuss the role that these vesicles play in horizontal transfer of disease resistance in pancreatic cancer. Min Yu, University of Southern California, will report on efforts to use circulating tumor cells to determine mechanisms of breast cancer metastasis, and Elodie Sollier, Vortex Biosciences, will share details of using the VTX-1 Liquid Biopsy System to isolate clinically-relevant CTCs.

In conjunction with the Association of Molecular Pathologists, there will be a session on Clinical Practice Guidelines for Ngs-Guided Oncology on Monday, February 12. Maria Arcila, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, chairs the session and will speak on the role of practice guidelines in NGS oncology testing. The session will also cover best practices for validation of clinical NGS bioinformatics pipelines (Somak Roy, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) and standards for interpreting and reporting sequence variants in cancer (Marina Nikiforova, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center). A panel discussion at the end of the session will explore several new clinical practice guideline publications.

On the afternoon of Monday, February 12, a session on Regulatory Challenges and Outlook for molecular diagnostics will make predictions and assessments of the regulatory landscape.  Andrew Fish, AdvaMedDx, chairs the session. Paul Radensky, McDermott Will & Emery LLP, will outline what intent FDA has shown toward regulation.  Kathy Hibbs, 23andme, will share updates on 23andMe’s journey with the regulatory body. During a group discussion on regulatory challenges for novel diagnostics, panelists will discuss the status of Congress’ efforts to develop legislation reforming diagnostics oversight, including LDTs; the latest developments at FDA; and how novel technologies and tests are challenging FDA. The always insightful Charles Mathews, Boston Healthcare Associates, will discuss real world evidence’s role in diagnostics. Finally, Kyle Fetter, XIFIN, will discuss closing the gap: commercialization and coverage for novel diagnostics.

Speakers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Naval Medical Research Center will discuss molecular diagnostics at the point-of-care on Wednesday, February 14. Diagnostics is moving past the bedside into developing and austere regions. Speakers will tackle potential treatment impacts for point-of-care NGS on antimicrobial resistant pathogens, how changes to clinical practice will enable us to identify thousands of diagnostic targets at the point-of-care, and which approach will lead to clinically-relevant results, and highest likelihood of regulatory approval for point-of-care sequencing: Amplicon sequencing? Metagenomic analysis?

A Thursday, February 15, morning session on cytometry will feature Amy Herr, an investigator with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and University of California, Berkeley. Herr’s team has introduced a new class of “electrophoretic cytometry” tools that increase target selectivity beyond simple immunoassays. She plans to discuss how the physics and chemistry accessible in microsystems allow both the scale-down of electrophoresis to single cells and the scale-up to concurrent analyses of large numbers of cells. In the same session, Elma Kadic, Merck & Co., will discuss validation steps taken to assess applicability of highly multiplexed mass cytometry analysis of single cells. Ermelinda Porpiglia, Stanford University, will relate how her team used single cell mass cytometry (CyTOF) to identify in vivo skeletal muscle stem cells and novel progenitor populations.