Session Abstract – PMWC 2019 Silicon Valley
Session Synopsis: Genomics-guided precision medicine has become more common practice for patient screening, disease diagnosis and profiling and treatment decision support in cancer and rare diseases. Yet there continues to be significant variability in the methods for analyzing, interpreting and reporting on genomic testing and most healthcare providers and testing laboratories have yet to integrate important clinical data into their testing protocols, such as stage of disease, prior treatments and outcomes data that can enhance or change the patient profiling or treatment. This panel will discuss the current state of diagnostic and theranostic testing and how Providers, Laboratories, Pharma and Payers can work collaboratively to establish more standardized protocols for the inclusion of RWE into more standardized test interpretation and reporting protocols and how these protocols can result in improved screening, treatment decisions support, patient cohort analytics for drug development, clinical trial design, matching of patients to trials and evidence based reimbursement decisions.
Session Chair Profile
Chief Business Officer VP, Market Development Clinical Genomics and Bioinformatics, QIAGEN
Biography
Sean works with broad range of customer, partners and collaborators in the development of genomics-guided precision medicine programs and capabilities. In this role, Sean is responsible for QIAGEN’s Clinical Genomics product portfolio offering serving the clinical decision support needs of molecular diagnostics and molecular pathology testing laboratories and healthcare provider networks globally whom are implementing genomics-based precision medicine programs and require expertise in dry lab capabilities including test interpretation and reporting. Sean led the development of QIAGEN’s recently commercialized Clinical Insight clinical decision support platform, an instrument, assay and pipeline agnostic test interpretation and reporting system that enables clinical testing labs to develop broad test menus and scale the analysis, interpretation and reporting of tests and to improve the insightfulness and action-ability of reporting to ordering physicians. Prior to QIAGEN, developed and managed Ingenuity’s marketing, sales and support operations as SVP, Global Commercial Operations and SVP, Corporate Development for Ingenuity Systems.
Speaker Profile
M.D., Hematopathologist / Molecular Pathologist, City of Hope National Medical Center
Biography
Dr. Raju K. Pillai is a physician scientist working at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, CA. He completed his residency at University of Southern California and fellowships in hematopathology and molecular genetic pathology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Triple board-certified in anatomic and clinical pathology, molecular genetic pathology and hematopathology, he is an active member of multiple professional associations, and has published more than 28 peer-reviewed publications, abstracts and book chapters. He is one of the expert hematopathologists at City of Hope with specialty expertise in diagnosis and genomic evaluation of hematologic diseases. As the director of Pathology Bioinformatics at City of Hope, Dr. Pillai is highly experienced in developing genomic assays and adapting bioinformatics tools for clinical use. His current research studies focus on multi-dimensional genomic analysis of cancer specimens and using that information to guide targeted therapy and immunotherapy.
Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Director and Principal Diagnostic Scientist, Precision Medicine Laboratories at AstraZeneca
Biography
James leads the search for, and development of, innovative diagnostic assays and technologies for MDx, TDx and PDx working through collaborations and partnering with academia and industry. Previously he led the Genomics Core at Cambridge University’s Cambridge Institute, he is seconded with Genomics England, and has consulted widely on genomics technologies. He has worked with genomics technologies, especially NGS, for the past 10-15 years. He was awarded PhD at UEA. He has co-authored multiple influential papers in cancer genomics including one of the largest genomic studies of Breast Cancer (Nature 2012), some of the first reports of ctDNA liquid biopsy: using amplicons (STM 2012) or exomes (Nature 2013) and developed a sWGS CNV pipeline for exome sequencing (Cell 2016). He has been highly involved in the NGS community and writes a very well received blog and is considered a thought-leader in the field.
Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Chief Scientist Officer, N-of-One
Biography
Sheryl Krevsky Elkin, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer at N-of-One. An early member of the N-of-One team, Dr. Elkin has led the interpretation of thousands of patient cases, establishing a rigorous process for the analysis of scientific and clinical evidence and presentation of molecular and clinical evidence to physicians to help guide their therapeutic decisions. Dr. Elkin has taken a lead role in the development of the N-of-One clinical interpretation methodology to support clinicians in identifying therapeutic strategies specific to each patient. Prior to joining N-of-One, Dr. Elkin completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Cancer Research, where she earned a fellowship from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She earned her doctorate in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Harvard Medical School and an A.B. in Biology and Music from Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, with High Distinction in Biology.
