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,…
A panel session at the recent Precision Medicine Leaders Summit, held in San Diego last month, offered great perspectives on the need to better represent global ethnic diversity in order to make the most of genomic advances for all patients. Panelists included Robert Sebra from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; NCBI’s Valerie Schneider; Benedict Paten from the University of California, Santa Cruz – representing the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health; and Justin Zook, co-leader of the NIST Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) Consortium. The discussion was moderated by our own Luke Hickey. The session kicked off…
Stanford’s Euan Ashley wrote a terrific review about the clinical use of genome sequencing for Nature Reviews Genetics. “Towards Precision Medicine” is well worth a read, covering topics from the ethnic background of the human reference genome to public interest in precision medicine. He also covers technical angles such as mapping of sequence reads for variant calling across challenging regions of the genome with known clinical significance. Ashley’s premise is that many of the current standards in genomics — from sequencers to analysis tools and more — were developed for use in basic research, where the consequences of inaccurate information…
We’re already looking forward to next month’s Personalized Medicine World Conference. Long before “precision medicine” was an industry catchphrase, PMWC was bringing together stakeholders from genomics companies and academic research, regulatory agencies, clinical groups, pharma/biotech, and more. Launched in 2009, the meeting has prompted important discussions as well as insight about how to move the field forward in a thoughtful way. From January 24th to the 27th, some 1,200 PMWC attendees will descend on the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event will kick off with a reception honoring the four awardees of this conference: Merck’s Roger Perlmutter…