Now that another year has passed it is great to see the NanoString Digital Spatial profiling microscope near its commercial launch. The platform will be in early access to select customers in the fourth quarter of 2018, and full commercial launch in the first half of 2019. For those interested in accessing the technology, they … Read more
With the beginning of the influential JP Morgan Healthcare investor conference this week in San Francisco, you can expect an avalanche of news from companies large and small regarding all things therapuetic and diagnostic. With an official count of about 9,000 attendees, there are many more in San Francisco who are there to have other … Read more
John Iafrede (Massachusetts General Hospital, MA) “There is a tidal wave of cell-free approaches; little performance testing; and the big question is who is going to pay for it.” This year’s Assocation for Molecular Pathology was held in Salt Lake City, Utah from November 15-18, 2017. (You can find the 2017 program and abstract here.) … Read more
While at the Association for Molecular Pathology in Salt Lake City Utah, I was able to interview Gang Song CEO of Pillar Biosciences to ask him about the challenges in the clinical laboratory that Pillar is tackling, about the basics of SLIMamp technology, and recent news. Check it out! #AMP2017
With over 2000 clinical laboratory professionals in molecular diagnostics and pathology, plenty of technology and offerings on display. This year the Association for Molecular Pathology takes place in Salt Lake City Utah, and promises an abundance of new technology as well as the new accompanying science around diagnostic testing. Since this is a molecular pathology … Read more
Summary: A new digital PCR instrument with two different sample throughput formats (24 and 96), many more partitions, and more colors to enable multiplexing The digital PCR market continues growing, as it finds its continued utility for absolute quantitation of nucleic acids for a multitude of applications, from rare virus detection in infectious disease to … Read more
Executive “TL;DR” Summary: An interesting platform called SlipChip with potential point-of-care applications, for fast and potentially very inexpensive digital PCR Update: This work has been recently published (Oct 2017) in Science Translational Medicine. While at the recent Next Generation Diagnostics Summit (organized by the Cambridge Healthtech Institute and held in Washington DC August 15-18 2017), … Read more
What will you do with 1000-fold improvement in sensitivity over standard immunoassays? What about 100-fold improvement in sensitivity over Luminex ones? The 1990’s were an exciting times in science. The Human Genome Project had published their first five-year plan (and thought then the human genome had 100,000 genes instead of 20,000). Scientific publications were coming … Read more
What happens when commercial interests do not align? Over a decade ago in 2002 when Novartis announced it was moving its global headquarters to Boston MA, it was viewed at the time that the United State’s pharmaceutical market was the most robust and attractive, and it made sense for Novartis to have a major presence … Read more
There is a numbers problem, and a biomarker one as well. Annually the worldwide cancer drug market is on the order of $110 Billion, and individual immuno-oncology drugs cost the US healthcare system on the order of $100K to $150K per year. With such large financial incentives, there are currently over 900 existing clinical trials at clinicaltrials.gov … Read more
A ‘gold rush’ multi-billion dollar business, three targets, four cancer drugs, four antibody-based companion diagnostic tests, sixteen FDA approvals The human immune system is remarkable. When you think about the preponderance of death by infectious disease throughout history, the top two causes of death in 1900 was influenza and pneumonia, followed by tuberculosis, at 202 … Read more
We are living in a world of exponential technologies, and genomics is one of several where expectations are not set at something 30% better or cheaper or faster, but 300% within the space of a few years. The term ‘exponential’ is starting to gain traction in the general public; here in the Washington DC area … Read more