The annual AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) meeting was held in Philadelphia PA from April 18-22, and being able to attend several sessions is a privilege. (Yes I’m writing this the morning of the last half-day, knowing that there’s still a full morning of sessions including the last poster session.) Over the years there … Read more
Theral Timpson produces a weekly podcast at Mendelspod.com, and in his latest edition he interviews me about Google X Life Sciences (I wrote about them before here), long-read sequencing (in particular Pacific Biosciences) which then I’m able to discuss the value of complete human diploid sequencing, and my involvement with the Behind the Bench blog. … Read more
In the closing session of the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting recently concluded in Marco Island, Florida, the main organizers Dr. Eric Green (National Human Genome Research Institute Director, Bethesda MD) and Dr. Elaine Mardis (Co-director with Rick Wilson of the Genome Institute of Washington University, St. Louis MO) asked an interesting question … Read more
After writing up ‘Marketing Precision Medicine’ it turned out that I spent so much time in giving the background and context, that I only was able to mention briefly the marketing challenge that the Precision Medicine Initiative brings. So here is Part 2, getting deeper into the Marketing challenge of precision medicine – a concern … Read more
Last week I listened in with interest on the Precision Medicine Workshop held at the NIH, and wrote up some thoughts about the need for them to market it effectively. You can access this post on LinkedIn – something of an experiment in posting in various places. We are living through a remarkable period in … Read more
Right about one calendar year ago I was asked to start writing for a new blog for the Genetic Analysis division of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Called ‘Behind the Bench’, it took a few months to get off the ground, and started posting right at the end of May 2014. A few personal comments on what … Read more
What does Google X have to offer in life science diagnostic development? I’ve picked up a phrase, ‘it’s a narrow world’, from somewhere in my travels. Way back in my laboratory manager days in Santa Monica California at the John Wayne Cancer Institute (‘laboratory manager’ sounds so much better than ‘laboratory technician’), I met a … Read more
Illumina announced in January at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference the NextSeq 500, which was trumpeted (at least at the level of press releases and public relations) of being available immediately. Knowing first-hand how difficult it is to launch a new system, I had expected the first systems to ship by the end of the first quarter (March), but here we are in mid-June and the first data is only now being reported on the NextSeq 500 system.
During AACR a number of great sessions were presented at ‘meet the expert’ sessions at 7am in the morning. One benefit of coming out West from the East Coast is not being able to stay up past 10:30pm or so local time, and waking up on my own at 4:30am local time every day. (A friend from the NCI told me he doesn’t like to ‘ping-pong between time zones’, and I whole-heartedly agree!)
At one of the these 7am sessions was one by Dana Pe’er of Columbia University, entitled “Understanding tumor heterogeneity using 40 markers at single cell resolution”. I thought: intriguing title, this should be interesting.
As a person who worked at a melanoma research institute once upon a time (the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica California, by the way), it was a pleasure to hear Steven Rosenberg’s plenary talk at the AACR meeting in San Diego. A lot has happened since 1997.
It was in the mid-1990’s that I was working in the laboratory of Dr. David Hoon, and the Institute was one of the few groups at that time that had several groups working on tumor immunology. One of our main ‘competitors’ in the tumor immunology field (for metastatic melanoma) was Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, which had the history of being the longest NCI Research Program Project grantees at that time (JWCI had the second-longest one).
The reason I enjoy coming to large meetings like the American Association for Cancer Research (April 5-9 in San Diego) is the surprising things I learn. And the story of Elana Simon is one of them.
She did not appear on the program, but a new award was initiated this year by the AACR organization called the ‘Junior Champion Cancer Research Award’, and she was the recipient. Her story began when she was 12 years old, diagnosed with a rare Fibrolamellar Hepatocellular Carcinoma, a form of liver cancer. Surgery was their only treatment option.
Living in the Washington DC area is a privilege. As a native Californian who has been on the East Coast for about 7 years now, living in the Mid-Atlantic has been so enjoyable for many professional and personal reasons.
A case in point is proximity to the National Institutes of Health, and last week I had the opportunity to attend the NCI’s Third Symposium on Translational Genomics. With speakers like Edison Liu (the leader of the new Jackson Laboratory personalized medicine center in CT founded in 2011 with $1.1B in public and private funding), George Church (who I haven’t heard in-person since the 2012 AGBT meeting), and others who I have personally interacted with at the NCI in the past (Snorri Thorgeirsson, Louis Staudt and Jean Claude Zenklusen), I knew that this meeting was going to be worth attending.