Speaker Profile
MS, Director, Clinical Business Development, Agena Bioscience
Biography
Ms. McMurdie leads Clinical Business Development in the Americas for Agena Bioscience, whose mission is to equip genomic and clinical testing laboratories with practical solutions that increase productivity and translate genomic discoveries into mainstream clinical practice. Ms. McMurdie as a dynamic business executive has spent the last 16 years in different areas related to clinical genomics, including Business Development, Clinical Market Development, LDT Support and advancing Next Generation Sequencing into the clinic with companies including Amgen and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Talk
Ultrasensitive Somatic Mutation Detection in cfDNA
Detection of low abundance mutations remains difficult due to tissue heterogeneity where the somatic tissue differs from the highly abundant wild type by only a single nucleotide. Ultrasensitive analysis methods of low frequency mutations offer the potential for non-invasive detection of acquired therapeutic resistance mutations and recurrence monitoring in cancer.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2017 Silicon Valley
Session Synopsis: There are technical hurdles related to liquid biopsy but these appear to be solvable. One possible biological barrier and fundamental issue is having a high enough analyte concentration in blood to measure and quantitate. As we gain more experience with this class and type of biomarker it is expected that technical advances will enable additional liquid biopsy applications in the clinical setting.
