In this webinar, three experts in cancer testing and therapeutics will explore the pivotal role of minimal residual disease (MRD) testing in the development of oncology drugs.

Chih-Yi Hsieh, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Impact Therapeutics, Johannes Nippgen, chief medical officer, Ionova, and Zhihong Zhang, director, CTO, and general manager at Burning Rock Dx will discuss how precise MRD diagnosis can revolutionize personalized treatment strategies for cancer patients.

The speakers will discuss:

• Recent Advancements: The newest MRD detection technologies and methodologies and the latest research advancements in this field.
• Patient Care: How MRD technology enhances cancer diagnosis and guides clinical treatment, offering a non-invasive method for monitoring cancer progression and treatment response.
• Drug Development: The influence of MRD on the direction of oncology drug development and its implications for future therapies.

The transcriptional expression of tumor genomes is exceptionally complex and often driven by extensive structural variation. Key oncogenic drivers can result from gene fusions of proto-oncogenes with novel fusion partners that can be difficult to detect by DNA sequencing alone, making RNA-seq an essential step in somatic tumor profiling approaches. More recently, expressed nongenic “dark matter” in tumors has also been hypothesized as a rich source of cancer neoantigens that may direct antitumor responses. However, a current challenge in enabling routine tumor RNA-seq is the standard use of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue preservation that causes damage to RNA molecules and can result in poor sequencing quality.

In this webinar, Brian Piening, technical director of clinical genomics at the Providence Molecular Genomics Lab, will describe approaches for unbiased whole-transcriptome profiling in FFPE tissues and describe some key applications of this technology for answering novel questions in cancer biology.

This webinar will cover:

• Lessons learned from the implementation of an FFPE RNA sequencing pipeline.
• Challenges in RNA sequencing with FFPE samples and methods for overcoming those challenges.
• The value of whole-transcriptome sequencing for characterizing fusions.
• RNA sequencing of tumor dark matter and validation with mass spectrometry-based proteomics.
• Key considerations when implementing clinical RNA sequencing pipelines.

With increasing antimicrobial resistance, providing rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) results to clinicians treating bacteremia patients is becoming ever more important. Hopefully, such fast, potentially life-saving answers will soon become the standard of care for these seriously ill patients.

In this webinar, speakers from two US clinical microbiology labs will discuss their evaluation of ASTar, a recently FDA-cleared high-throughput fully automated rapid AST system for Gram-negative blood cultures. They will describe their motivation for exploring rapid AST options for positive blood cultures, their labs’ experience with ASTar’s usability, and the timing and accuracy of its results compared to legacy AST methods. They will also discuss retrospective chart reviews of patients to examine the potential clinical impact of faster AST results for patients with bacteremia and sepsis.

New short-read sequencers, characterized by improved read quality, are reaching the market. Yutaka Suzuki and colleagues in the Department of Computational Biology and Medical Sciences at the University of Tokyo have installed and started operating an AVITI sequencer from Element Biosciences, producing read quality data exceeding Q40 (error rate: 0.01 percent).

In this webinar, Suzuki will discuss how the team compared AVITI sequencing results with their conventional sequencer to confirm its performance in mRNA-seq, single-cell RNA-seq, whole-genome sequencing, and panel sequencing, obtaining strong correlations between results. Panel sequencing confirmed low-frequency mutations in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from healthy elderly individuals in genes associated with clonal hematopoiesis, requiring high confidence in the sequencing reads. Suzuki will also share results from a new sequencing kit from Element called Cloudbreak UltraQ, which increases read quality from Q40 to Q50 (error rate: 0.001 percent).

In this webinar, Rui Chen, director of the Center of Single Cell Omics at Baylor College of Medicine, will report on the generation of a comprehensive atlas of full-length transcript isoforms in the mouse retina at the single-cell level using long-read single-cell RNA Sequencing. Chen’s team profiled approximately 30,000 mouse retina cells using a combination of 1.54 billion Illumina short reads and 1.40 billion Oxford Nanopore long reads.

Important findings:

• Results in gene expression and cell annotation between long-read and short-read datasets were comparable. The lab’s results indicate that single-cell long-read RNA sequencing alone would be sufficient to capture the information.

• Leveraging long-read scRNA-seq, the lab detected a total of 44,325 transcript isoforms, among which over 16,000 are novel. Furthermore, the team pinpointed 7,383 isoforms exclusive to specific cell classes, a considerable portion of which were novel.

• Isoform usage patterns varied among different cell classes and subclasses.

• A total of 1,055 intra-chromosomal gene fusions were detected within the mouse retina.

Climate change, zoonotic disease outbreaks, and antibiotic resistance are escalating global crises that demand a rapid, accurate, and scalable diagnostic infrastructure, highlighting the critical role of molecular diagnostics in both detection and prevention within today's public health strategies. While quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) has become the benchmark technology for detecting pathogens due to its exceptional sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, time-consuming workflows and high costs pose significant limitations. One factor contributing to these limitations is that both assay designs and the basic protocols used for qPCR testing have remained largely unchanged over the past three decades.

In this webinar, Stephen Bustin, professor of molecular medicine at Anglia Ruskin University, will explain the concept underlying FlashPCR, a combination of novel assay design, reagents, and low ∆T amplification that reduces the time required for PCR amplification. This breakthrough retains the high sensitivity and specificity characteristic of traditional qPCR-based diagnostics while making it ideally suited for point-of-care testing environments.

Additionally, Stephen Bustin will discuss a modification that can help reduce the complexity of the PCR protocol by using a single defined low denaturation temperature, enabling the completion of qPCR assays in as fast as two minutes. These innovations represent a significant leap forward in molecular diagnostics, offering the potential to allow significant changes in support of timely clinical decision making, lower the cost of testing, and improve patient outcomes in diverse healthcare settings in the future.

The diagnostic process for hematologic malignancies can be complex and time consuming; it includes morphological analysis of bone marrow and peripheral blood, immunohistochemistry, flow cytometry, cytogenetics and, under certain circumstances, additional testing.

Starting with morphology, flow cytometry, and cytogenetics can help reduce unnecessary or duplicative testing that may not be covered by insurance. Additional testing can then be performed if recommended by guidelines or if results are inconclusive. This workflow requires close collaboration between clinicians and laboratory staff but enables more timely and efficient diagnostic and prognostic information to help guide treatment decisions.

In this webinar, Girish Kunapareddy, clinical assistant professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, and Stephanie McAlhany, medical director at Labcorp Oncology’s Brentwood Laboratory, will review a case and discuss how clinicians and laboratory staff can work together to alleviate complexities in the diagnostic process for hematologic malignancies.

Long-read SMRT (single-molecule real-time) sequencing on the PacBio platform is widely used for applications that are challenging with short-read NGS, and producing robust libraries requires precision and expertise. With the recent advancements in the throughput and speed of PacBio HiFi sequencing on the Revio, labs need reliable, efficient sample prep methods to maximize sequencing capabilities. Volta Labs is using advanced electrowetting technology and miniaturization to solve scalability, flexibility, and robustness challenges in PacBio library preparation.

In this webinar, Maya Fridrikh, PacBio sequencing manager at Mount Sinai, along with Greg Young, senior product manager at PacBio, will share data and use cases based on their experience with the Callisto Sample Prep System from Volta Labs, which enables labs to maximize sample throughput with preloaded apps that require no user programming or optimization. Mount Sinai is utilizing automated sample prep to generate PacBio libraries quickly and effectively while maintaining yield and sequencing quality.

Key takeaways:

• Users in a core lab setting can be trained in minutes.
• High molecular weight DNA can be produced with sufficient length and yields from a single sample.
• The system is compatible with multiple shearing (G-tube, Megaruptor3) and size selection methods (bead-based, gel-based).

With over 1,500 clinical trials incorporating liquid biopsy testing, the use of ctDNA monitoring is rapidly expanding. Initially used to identify acquired resistance variants, ctDNA is now crucial for evaluating residual disease and assessing molecular responses to therapies, such as antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs. This allows for quick decision-making in translational research.

In this webinar, Jonathan Beer, senior director of diagnostic sciences at Bristol Myers Squibb, will share the pharmaceutical sector’s perspective on the multifaceted applications of ctDNA. Learn how ctDNA aids in selecting therapy based on specific biomarkers and offers early insights into molecular response.

Christine Petersen, director of business development at Foundation Medicine, will present new data from the FoundationOne Monitor ctDNA monitoring assay and its potential for enabling researchers and drug developers to gain insights using ctDNA throughout clinical programs.¹ She will also report on how biopharma partners have used FoundationOne Monitor to optimize dose selection for new therapies in early-phase trials and add value beyond standard pharmacodynamic analysis.

The speakers will:

• Explore ctDNA monitoring applications in biopharmaceutical drug development.
• Examine case studies highlighting ctDNA's impact in clinical trials.
• Introduce FoundationOne Monitor, a tissue-naive test for ctDNA monitoring
• Reveal how ctDNA can enhance drug development strategies.  

1. For Investigational Use Only. The performance characteristics of this product have not been established.

US-F1M-2400006

Advances in biomarker testing, analytical methods, and real-world datasets (RWD) that include biomarker and clinical data are rapidly enhancing precision oncology, enabling both forward and reverse translation and allowing for more effective patient-specific treatments. These innovations play a crucial role in drug development, as well as clinical, payor and regulatory decision making. However, it's crucial to consider the strengths and limitations of different approaches and datasets when designing analyses and interpreting precision oncology data.

In this webinar, Milan Radovich, chief scientific officer at Caris Life Sciences, Professor Charu Aggarwal, from the University of Pennsylvania, and Neal Meropol, vice president of research oncology at Flatiron Health, will explore the evolving state of precision oncology research and the pivotal role that high-quality linked clinical and multiomic RWD plays in accelerating all stages of drug development to maximize the success of novel therapeutics. The webinar will be moderated by Flatiron’s Kristin Zimmerman Savill, director of scientific engagement for precision oncology.

The speakers will discuss:

• The rapidly evolving state of precision oncology research.
• Key considerations for different methodological approaches and datasets when designing or interpreting data from precision oncology research.
• Case studies highlighting how RWD can be used more effectively in precision oncology research to drive the development of novel and effective therapies, guide clinical, payor and regulatory decision-making, and improve patient outcomes.