A widely attended conference that is coming up on September 21-23 is the third international conference on Genomics 2015 in San Antonio, Texas. The theme of this year’s conference is “Implications and Impacts of Genomic Advances on Global Health“, which promises to provide some interesting presentations and discussions. Current issues in the field to be addressed include next-gen sequencing, clinical and cancer genomics, pharmacogenomics, bioinformatics, and biotechnology. A main focus of the conference is to deliver recent achievements and scientific advancements in each of these respective fields to the attendees.

Our very own CEO and President, Dr. Andreas Scherer is one of the keynote speakers at Genomics 2015, and we are excited for him to share his expertise in the field of cancer genomics. Cancer genomics is the study of genetic mutations responsible for cancer, using genome sequencing and bioinformatics. Andreas’s talk, Utilizing cancer sequencing in the clinic: Best Practices in variant analysis, filtering, and annotation, will focus on building effective cancer gene panels using state of the art filtering and visualization techniques. It will also cover the usage of public data sources (ex. Cosmis and Clinvar) and outline how to best capture specific findings in the clinic that can be used as future annotation sources.

Throughout the presentation, he will address questions such as the following:

• Now as the field moves beyond gene panels, what is the yield of whole exome and genome sequencing in this context?
• What can we expect in the future?
• What best practices can we employ as the chances of incidental findings increase as we move beyond gene panels?.

In conclusion, Andreas will cover how to best structure patient’s reports to separate results with a high degree of certainty from findings that are of uncertain clinical relevance. If you are interested in this topic, feel free to contact us at [email protected] for more information!