Update-1…1/21/19 Liquid Biopsy
I attended a Panel Session on Cancer Liquid Biopsy and although progress is being made on molecular diagnostics there are no newsworthy breakthroughs nor actual data showing a hard timeline. Here is an article from BIO 2016.
There are over 70 genes that need to be tested and voluminous data is being generated in comparison with tissue. One potential application would be targeting patients on on immunotherapy.
See many previous articles on the topic including GRAIL and other efforts by Illumina (ILMN) and other companies in molecular diagnostics. In the meantime there are many funded companies working on the technology because of the huge potential for early detection of cancer.
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Precison Medicine: Innovative Companies Integrating Molecular Tools with Big Data
The Moderator Francis deSouza, President and CEO of Illumina explored longer term approaches to Precision Health and personalized medicine. The Panel included Executives from the following companies below with comments from Tycho Peterson a J.P.Morgan Analyst.
The molecular tools and next generation technologies are too complicated to go into detail here so to appreciate the long-term vision and potential of these innovative platforms you can review the information from each of the companies.The longer term goal might be described as an extension of personalized medicine to look at a continuum of disease, develop “universal diagnostics” and utilizing sequencing to explore hereditary diseases for “designer therapies”. One concern of this long term vision would be cost since it might be accessible to only the wealthiest consumers but costs would come down over time. Here is summary of an article we wrote from BIO in 2017 on Precision Medicine.
Exact Sciences (EXAS) has been public for several years and has revenues from their Cologuard test and the other companies are private and earlier stage.
Tycho Peterson
US – Life Science Tools & Diagnostics, J.P. Morgan
Kevin Conroy
Chairman & CEO, Exact Sciences Corporation
Exact Sciences Corp. is a molecular diagnostics company focused on the early detection and prevention of the deadliest forms of cancer. The Cologuard stool test was approved by the FDA in August 2014 and results from Exact Sciences’ prospective 90-site, point-in-time, 10,000-patient pivotal trial were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in March 2014. A near term goal for the Company is to move to a ‘Liquid Biopsy” to detect DNA markers for all major cancers in the blood.
Othman Laraki
CEO, Color Genomics
Color helps create an end-to-end delivery model that links precision data to risk, risk to decisions, and decisions to behavior change across populations.
Chad Robins
CEO & Co-founder, Adaptive Biotechnologies Corporation
Adaptive is focused on immune driven medicine with an immune profiling system based upon immunosequencing , TCR mapping and Computational Biology and Software Analytics to precisely detect and attack disease.