Genetic diagnostics
Description
A popular term in the clinical but also in the pharmaceutical world is personalised medicine, which due to the new advances in patient diagnostics gained recently more and more attention. The use of molecular diagnostics to specify the particular gene composition of a patient offers the key to drive therapeutic interventions, tailored to the patient needs. Personalised medicine offers an enormous potential for the pharmaceutical industry,
clinicians and patients and the global market is accordingly estimated by Price
Waterhouse Coopers to be 232$ billion with an annual increase of about 11%.
Examples for personalised medicine approaches are already present. For instance, women with a positive diagnosis for breast cancer can get a genetic test that determines whether the tumour is processing a gene named HER-2 in an excessive way. This would indicate that these women are promising candidates to use a drug called Herceptin. Another example presented here is a genetic test to detect the presence of an abnormal gene variant in patients with Acute/Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia, which can be treated by a drug called Gleevec. Another famous example, although only for personal and not for clinical use, is the Google-funded company 23andMe. 23andMe offers personal gene analyses from salvia samples to assess risk factors for 95 diseases or to predict individual responses to drugs such as blood thinner or coffee.
However, although a lot of progress has been made during recent years, i.e. the
introduction of a clinically validated scanner for diagnostic analysis of genes (DX scanner from Affymetrix), going along with a general increase in expenditures to push personalised medicine, major challenges are waiting and need to be addressed in the future.
In general, there is no lack in possible genetic variations in patients. The problem is to pinpoint the ones that are useful diagnostic indicators. While this is particularly a major challenge for the Bioinformaticians analysing the genetic data yet another obstacle are the complex regulatory rules of FDA and CE for molecular diagnostic tests.
Crosslinks is addressing both of the aforementioned problems. Being an experienced partner for bioinformatics data analysis, which is provided by an international team with scientific knowledge in biology and Bioinformatics, Crosslinks is able to support its customers during the development and implementation of new diagnostic approaches such as the molecular diagnosis of Acute Myelogenous Leukemia or bacterial identification. The second problem arising from the tremendous regulatory rules of the authorities will be solved by our validated Diagnostic Analysis Platform (vDAP), which is the backbone of our centralised, internet-enabled diagnostic projects.
Drinks will be held at 18:00, the speaker will start at 19:00, followed by dinner and discussion at 20:00. The aim is to finish around 21:00-21:30.
Location
Wagenstraat 144, 2512 BA The Hague
Organiser
Circle The Hague
Name and contact details for information
Dennis Heidweiller Coordinator Circle The Hague