March 3, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Genomics need to bridge the gap between science and medicine so that doctors and clinicians can better understand how to use the “science boom” currently boosting the industry, a group of experts said at a life sciences conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The panel, “The Genomics Revolution: How We Got Here and Where Are We Headed?” took place at CALBIO2015. With over 100 California life science companies and investors in attendance, the conference has become a favorite for discussions involving opportunities and scale in the rapidly innovating world of science.
Panelists were Pieter van Rooyen, founder and chief executive officer, Edico Genome; Antonius Schuh, chief executive officer, Trovagene; and Alex Dickinson, senior vice president Cloud Genomics, Illumina . It was moderated by Greg Lucier, former chief executive officer, Life Technologies .
The topic was particularly salient because California is a hot bed of genomics start-ups, industry leaders and researchers working to translate the promise of genomic medicine to improved healthcare.
“With the arrival of Illumina’s $1,000 genome, it’s a pivotal time for the genomics space as decreased costs enable genomics to move from the lab into the clinic,” said organizers. Personalizing treatment is coming to the foreground of medicine: San Diego Moores Cancer Center recently announced every patient will be sequenced when they walk in the door in order to understand the unique blueprint of each patient’s cancer, and therefore personalize their treatment.
That type of “Moores Rule” will soon be prevalent everywhere, said van Rooyen, although what to do with all that patient duty can seem like an overwhelming task.
“It’s really about getting to the real utility of data and getting to what genomics about,” said van Rooyen. “We have more data than ever before. We need to be able to analyze data fast to get to answers more quickly. I’m excited about technologies that can analyze data faster and share data in an efficient way.”
Technologies like ones used in prenatal testing and throughout a patient’s journey treating a disease can also create privacy issues, said experts, although the sheer amount of information gathered will be a boon to science in the long term.
“There is the problem that needs to be addressed with the sharing of data is privacy and security for patients,” said van Rooyen, “But massive data sets eventually will yield information to help solve clinical problems.”
Perhaps the biggest difficulty faced by scientists working in genomics is that often doctors or clinicians don’t have a working familiarity with the advances or technology available, said the panelists.
“The big challenge is that genomics is still a science and not medical practice yet; we need to bridge that gap so clinicians can get actionable information from genomics, which will be exciting,” said Dickinson. “Most oncologists, even though dealing with a disease of the genome, are not geneticists.”
Still, once medical treatment and understanding catches up to science, there is no doubt that doctors will find tools to use every ounce of data to further a patient’s health—particularly in the realm of tech, said the group.
“The future of medicine is bioinformatics,” said van Rooyen. “Physicians in the future will be software assisted. We need to focus on getting scale and momentum behind genomics.”
BioSpace Temperature Poll
Last week controversy erupted over the compensation package for Sanofi’s new CEO, Olivier Brandicourt, with several French government officials decrying the amount, calling it “incomprehensible.” Brandicourt could walk off with as much as $4.5 million in a “golden handshake” payment in addition to making $4.76 million a year. That base figure is comprised by a fixed annual salary of $1.36 million a year, which is supplemented by a performance-related bonus of between 150 to 250 percent, as well as stock options and performance shares.
So BioSpace wants your opinion, what do you think?
