One of our favorite January traditions is taking part in the Precision Medicine World Conference (PMWC), a three-day Silicon Valley event focused on exploring challenges and opportunities in personalized medicine. Taking place this year January 22-24 at the Computer History Museum, the slate of more than 350 speakers in 65-plus sessions will offer a cutting-edge look at the field. The conference is co-hosted by Stanford Health Care; the University of California, San Francisco; Johns Hopkins University; the University of Michigan; Duke University; and Duke Health.
On the docket this year: PMWC will cover topics including artificial intelligence and machine learning, CRISPR, immunotherapy, microbiome studies, and more. We’re particularly interested in presentations about national sequencing efforts such as the All of Us initiative, clinical sequencing, and infectious disease monitoring. The conference is also well-known for its award program. The prestigious PMWC Luminary Award is going this year to Emmanuelle Charpentier for CRISPR/Cas9 innovations and to Elizabeth Blackburn for discovering telomeres. Meanwhile, the PMWC Pioneer Award will be given to Ronald Levy for pioneering antibodies to treat cancer, Sir John Bell for his role in precision medicine efforts in the UK, and Alan Ashworth for discoveries in breast cancer and more.
Lori Aro, our senior director of clinical genomics, will be speaking at PMWC in the Genomic Profiling Showcase on January 24th at 11:15 am. Her presentation will update attendees on how long-read PacBio sequencing can be a good fit for clinical assay development since it provides the longest average reads, highest consensus accuracy, and most uniform coverage of any sequencing technology available today.
There’s still time to register for PMWC 2018 and they’re offering a 10% discount until January 11. We hope to see you at the meeting!