Dr. James Allison, MD Anderson: We Are Still Missing A Good Baseline

Dr. James Allison of MD Anderson Cancer Center, considered by many to be the “father of immunotherapy” is a recipient of the PMWC 2017 Pioneer Award. In his interview published earlier this week on Medscape highlighted some of the key focus areas of PMWC 2017 Silicon Valley.

“Immunotherapy by itself will become the standard of care for some cancers.Immunotherapies have not been as effective across some types of cancers, and this is a challenge.”
James Allison

Precision Medicine is poised to leave its marks in cancer therapy, a disease area that has the potential to become a preeminent area of application as demonstrated with the recent rise and emergence of successes and challenges of immunotherapy. Though, with all the excitement and publicity, we truly are still in the early phases of immunotherapy and other therapies when it comes to detection, treatment, and management of all cancer types.

“We definitely are still missing a good baseline that can tell you who is going to respond.”
James Allison

Deciphering a patient’s molecular imprint is a prerequisite to successful disease detection or treatment selection. It’s envisioned that this will one day allow for targeted specific therapy approaches maximizing responses across the entire spectrum of diseases.

“We need to evaluate the economic impact of all the drugs that treat cancer as well as other types of diseases. What it comes down to is: How much has one improved both the patient’s quality of life and longevity? This is very complex, but we need to look at this across the board. The cost has to come down or we will quickly bankrupt the healthcare system.”
James Allison

Understanding and (re)defining the value of new diagnostics and treatments is a must have, especially when it comes to Precision Medicine. Cost and regulatory aspects have to be adapted or the healthcare system is destined to collapse, or run the risk of not fulfilling its mandate for broad access to patients across the economic spectrum.

Join us and meet Dr. Allison and 200+ speakers at PMWC 2017 Silicon Valley featuring 40+ sessions, 60-minutes each focusing on diagnostics and therapeutics, data analysis and biomarker identification or their specific applications, the value, cost, regulations, and the economics of precision medicine:

6 Immunotherapy sessions
5 Liquid Biopsy sessions
11 Dx & Rx sessions
8 Next-Generation Sequencing sessions
3 Genomics Data Analysis sessions
5 Healthcare (Big) Data sessions
2 Patent Law & Policies sessions
1 Government Initiatives session
2 Economics sessions
3 Infectious Disease sessions
4 Clinical Enablement sessions
2 Emerging Technologies sessions
1 Patient Perspectives session

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Dr. James Allison, MD Anderson: We Are Still Missing A Good Baseline

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