Leading industry insights from precision medicine professionals
This May 18th, London will welcome over 30 leading international speakers to the inaugural World Precision Medicine Congress. Ahead of then conference organisers, Terrapinn, wanted to give you a taste of what you will hear on-site with some exclusive insights from some of these esteemed thought-leaders.
Click here to read the full speaker interviews as part of the Industry Insights eBook.
The past year has highlighted both challenges in the areas of big data and healthcare uptake, but also shown the great potential this medical approach has in areas of unmet medical need, notably rare diseases.
Terrapinn spoke to their revered speaker faculty to find out what they thought had been the biggest achievement in their respective industries over the last 12 months. Niven Narain, Co-Founder, President & CEO of Berg Health notes that “over the past year we have seen the initiation of industry, government, and academic collaborations to create a dialogue around precision medicine”. Yiu-Lian Fong, Senior Director for Global Diagnostic Innovation at Johnson & Johnson pInnovation credits the biggest achievement to be “President Obama’s launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) with a budget of $215 million in fiscal year 2016 and development of the framework for NIH’s Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program to enrol 1 million or more Americans to expand our knowledge and practice of precision medicine”.
In terms of challenges in the implementation of precision medicine, Victoria Rimkunas, Head of the Integrated Diagnostics Lab at Merrimack Pharmaceuticals thinks that the biggest difficulty has been in “disparities in patient access to high quality diagnostics that are being used to inform their care”.
They were also asked for their opinions on what disease area they thought held the most potential for treatment or cure within the precision medicine sector. Peter Johnson, Chief Clinician at Cancer Research UK considers that “cancer treatment will continue to lead the way in this: as oncologists we have so much information about the molecular landscape of cancers and such a diverse pipeline of novel therapeutics to bring to bear on the problem”.
Amongst the questions asked to the speakers, Terrapinn wanted to find out who, either a person or company, they thought would be ‘the next big thing’. The responses were very much determined by which therapeutic field they were most interested in but Tony Freemont, Head of the MRC/ESRC Molecular Pathology Node in Manchester thinks it will “not [be] a company we have currently heard of, because the next great application will come from people thinking way outside the box”.
Finally the speaker interviews were concluded by asking them all what they think will be the biggest topic of discussion at this year’s event. Alastair Kent, Director at Genetic Alliance UK put forward his view that it would likely be “pricing and patient access”.
To read the full speaker interviews, as well as many more, click here to download the Industry Insights eBook now.
Conference Manager, Hannah Yates, was also asked her thoughts ahead of the event on 18-19 May at the Business Design Centre in Angel, London. “For the precision medicine sector to really reach its potential, we think it is key to bring together industry, healthcare and academia from across the variety of disciplines included under the precision medicine umbrella and from across the globe. The World Precision Medicine Congress is truly a global forum for this industry, alongside the co-located cell and gene conference, and I look forward to seeing you all there”.
To register your discounted place, please click here.