Like a recurring theme, Illumina – when at JPMorgan Healthcare Conference -is contributing to some of the most clearly heard and most impactful announcements in the space. An obligatory new sequencer was released and along with that, the news of the launch of a new company named Grail focusing on liquid biopsy-based cancer diagnostics. Illumina is bound to deliver on its vision to leave a mark in the world of healthcare and personalized medicine

With Grail, the overriding goal is to provide a blood test by 2019 that costs $1,000 or less for early (pre-symptomatic) cancer detection.The lineup of key investors of this San Francisco-based company includes Bill Gates and others. Illumina will retain majority control. Furthermore, Illumina launched a new MiniSeq sequencing system, a flexible bench top sequencer for a broad range of DNA and RNA sequencing applications in the area of targeted sequencing. Priced at $49,500 (half the price of a MiSeq) this system represents, as of now, the most affordable Illumina sequencer, and is expected to find wide-spread use by a range of laboratories wanting to perform sequencing in-house.

These exciting recent developments perfectly help setting the stage for our upcoming 10th Personalized Medicine World Conference taking place next week on January 24-27 in Silicon Valley.

We are thrilled to see this news align with our upcoming conference agenda, which focuses on the relevance and developments of next-generation sequencing, new applications in clinical diagnostics, and several sessions fully dedicated to liquid biopsy advancements and their applications. The lineup includes speakers from commercial companies active in the sequence systems space with a dedicated session that covers “NGS and Clinical Interplay” involving presenters from Illumina,Thermo Fisher Scientific, PacBio, PAMF, Genia, and Roche Sequencing. In addition, conference attendees will benefit from a large representation of companies building diagnostic solutions in and around liquid biopsy (Roche Dx, Caris Life Sciences, Cynvenio, RainDance Tech, Epic Sciences, Guardant Health, Trovagene, Foundation Medicine, OncoDNA, Bio-Rad, Toma Biosciences, Transgenomic Inc., Natera, Genomic Health, Janssen R&D, Bayer, Exosome Diagnostics, Fluxion Bio, and more).

Please note that we are about to close registration due to attendee volume so if you are not attending this year, we hope to see you next year for PMWC 2017 SV on Jan. 23-25.