Looking Forward to Sequencing Advances and Novel Findings at PMWC 2019

Advances in personalized medicine — whether it’s the discovery of a new pathogenic variant or a success story about a patient treated with a tailored therapy — seem to be almost a daily occurrence. That’s why we’re particularly excited to attend the Precision Medicine World Conference (PMWC), co-hosted by Stanford, UCSF, Duke, Johns Hopkins & U. of Michigan, taking place January 20-23 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The meeting brings together thought-leaders of business, government, healthcare-delivery, research and technology to share the latest developments, challenges, and triumphs in the field.
PMWC is well known for giving out prestigious awards, and this year’s slate of honorees is as impressive as ever. This year’s Luminary Awards, given for recent contributions to accelerate personalized medicine, will go to Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania for his CAR-T work, Genetic Alliance’s Sharon Terry for her efforts to empower individuals with their own health data, and Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute for his development of optogenetics and CRISPR.
The Pioneer Award, which honors “rare individuals who presaged the advent of personalized medicine when less evolved technology and encouragement from peers existed,” will be given to George Yancopoulos at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
If you’ll be attending the meeting, don’t miss our own Lori Aro, senior director of clinical genomics, who will give a talk entitled “Sequencing with confidence: Highly accurate single-molecule long reads” on January 22^nd at 8:30 am. We’re also looking forward to talks from Andrew Carroll at Google AI and Randy Scott from Invitae, among many others.
There’s still time to register for PMWC 2019 and they’re offering our blog readers a 10% discount until December 31. We hope to see you at the meeting!