8:50 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Harnessing Improved Technologies to Advance the Industry Applications of Liquid Biopsy
9:00 am What’s New? An Overview of the Liquid Biopsy Space
Synopsis
• Uncovering the latest advancements, challenges and strategies seen across the liquid biopsy field
• Discussing the current state of play on clinical use and uptake of liquid biopsies: How do we advance this even further?
• Where next? Taking a look into what’s on the horizon for non-invasive tests and key next steps for drug developers
9:30 am Accurate Biomarker Identification Through Digital Sequencing: Accelerating Adoption of ctDNA in Trials & the Clinic
Synopsis
• Lessons from 100,000 patients to improve assay performance
• Clinical trial case studies for faster enrollment and study insights
• Improving patient treatment and outcomes
10:00 am Panel Discussion: Women in Precision Medicine
Synopsis
Coming soon. Uniting scientific and business leaders from all key stakeholders of the community, this keynote panel discussion will highlight the importance of a diverse workforce and provide actionable takeaways for increased advocacy in individual workplaces. Stay tuned!
10:45 am Speed Networking
11:10 am Morning Refreshments
11:30 am Bridging the GAP in Liquid Biopsies — CTCs & cfDNA: A Comprehensive Approach to Detection & Monitoring of Cancer
Synopsis
• Cancer is a high complexity disease which requires a combination of biological insights from both genotypic and phenotypic analysis to guide precision medicine
• Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and cell free DNA (cfDNA) liquid biopsies enable complementary information for clinical decisions, allowing for diagnosis, accurate prognosis, therapeutic target selection, as well as monitoring response and resistance to treatment
• Find out how these technologies enable a true Comprehensive Cancer Profiling from a single tube of blood to get all the biological insights needed
12:00 pm Novel Digital PCR & Mutation Enrichment Technologies for the Analysis of Clinically Relevant DNA Alterations in Liquid Biopsies
Synopsis
• With the increasing interest in treatment assessment using liquid biopsy and circulating DNA, sensitive and multiplexed detection of tumor-derived alterations in blood are desirable
• We provide novel forms of digital PCR, as well as mutation enrichment-based real time PCR methods that (a) enable several orders of magnitude improvement of detecting mutations or microsatellite instability than currently possible; (b) are highly multiplex-able; (c) reduce cost of analysis
• Application in circulating DNA from clinical cancer samples will be presented
12:30 pm Extracellular Vesicles in Disease Monitoring: Evaluating a New Analyte Approach for Liquid Biopsy
Synopsis
• Understanding the advantage of extracellular vesicles as a diagnostic and prognostic tool for certain applications
• Strategies to maximize marker detection from extracellular vesicles through purification and analysis techniques
• How are extracellular vesicles being applied? Evaluating the safety, predictive and diagnostic markers
1:00 pm
Networking Lunch
Addressing Pre-Analytical Steps to Maximize Reliability of Trials & Ensure Quality Sample Management
2:00 pm Leveraging Liquid Biopsies in Clinical Development Across a Portfolio
Synopsis
• Finding the specific driver of disease to inform target identification
• Overcoming key challenges in translation to clinical trials
• Exploring sensitivity levels required for biomarker and analyte types across a portfolio
2:30 pm Exploiting RNA in Liquid Biopsies for Precision Medicine Purposes
Synopsis
• Biofluids are rich sources of messenger RNA, circular RNA and microRNAs
• The Human Biofluid RNA Atlas: a novel compendium of human extracellular transcriptomes
• The Extracellular RNA Quality Control study: benchmarking plasma RNA transcriptome profiling
3:00 pm Afternoon Refreshments
3:30 pm The Impact of Matrix Selection as a Pre-Analytical Variable on BloodBased Protein Biomarker Quantification
Synopsis
• In the context of protein biomarkers measurements, the goal is to measure the levels that are circulating
• Understanding the impact of proper sample matrix selection is an important piece of this. Platelets and other circulating cells can release proteins during the process of coagulation
• Anticoagulants can affect the ability to detect different proteins. If the proper matrix is not selected the measurements may be incorrect
4:00 pm BloodPAC Data Common: Accelerating Data Sharing & Analysis
Synopsis
• Exploring the BloodPAC Data Common and its applications in liquid biopsy-based studies
• Heading for approval: Demostrating how having an FDA approved Data Common positively impacts your future studies
• Looking ahead to future directions and applications of the project
4:30 pm Panel Discussion
Synopsis
• Tackling assay validation and ensuring markers are clinically applicable for expedited drug development
• Finding the specific driver of disease: How far can current technologies take us?
• Cost vs quality: Avoiding false positives by finding the right, cost-effective technology for your biomarker