GenomeWebinars

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of molecular diagnostics and compelled laboratories to quickly validate new methods and increase testing capacity through the expansion of resources and high-throughput automation. As SARS-CoV-2 infections reach an equilibrium, and the virus moves from a pandemic to an endemic disease, testing demand is decreasing, revealing the opportunity to address broader public health needs through the expansion of infectious disease diagnostics.

Aegis BioPharma Laboratory launched COVID-19 testing in April 2020 with a daily capacity of 3,000 tests and quickly scaled during that first year to over 100,000 tests per day. The lab has performed over 14.2 million COVID-19 PCR tests to date, servicing a broad network across the United States, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Aegis leveraged the partnerships, technologies, and infrastructure developed during the COVID-19 surge to build the infectious disease testing menu aimed at limiting the spread of health risks within the community.

Attendees of this webinar will learn how Aegis is:

• Utilizing extra resources and capacity to create opportunities for business development and laboratory growth, post-pandemic.
• Standardizing laboratory processes and procedures to efficiently add new workflows.
• Creating flexible and customizable infectious disease panels that provide actionable results to meet the ever-changing public health needs.

The evolutionarily conserved EZH2 enzyme is upregulated in most solid cancers. It mediates repressive histone H3-Lys-27-tri-methylation (H3K27me3), which leads to tumor suppressor gene silencing. EZH2-dependent transcriptional signatures predict prognosis in cancer patients.

EZH2 silencing blocks metastasis and causes selective cancer cell death. Several EZH2 inhibitors (EZH2i) are currently in clinical trials. However, while EZH2i monotherapy isn’t effective in most solid malignancies, synthetically lethal approaches — such as EZH2i tazemetostat in combination with doxorubicin and immunotherapy in advanced epithelioid sarcomas — have generated promising results.

In this session, Francesco Crea and Francesca Salani will provide an overview of EZH2 inhibitors in cancer therapy and the development of a non-invasive diagnostic tool to monitor target engagement and downregulation in patients exposed to EZH2 inhibitors.

Terry Kelly, chief innovation officer at Volition, will also outline how Volition works with organizations such as the Open University through its Nu.Q Discover program, which gives scientists and drug developers access to a range of state-of-the-art assays for rapid epigenetic profiling in disease, model development, preclinical testing, and clinical studies.

3D genomics is a powerful NGS approach that provides unparalleled access to the sequence, structure, and regulatory landscape of genomes. In this webinar, Anthony Schmitt, senior vice president of science at Arima Genomics, will share how 3D genomics allows researchers to study noncoding regions of the genome, explore structural variants driving disease, and identify new therapeutic targets.

In this webinar, you will:

1. Hear about exciting new developments in 3D genome technologies and workflows.
2. Learn how to use targeted 3D genome methods, including capture Hi-C with Agilent SureSelect probes, to characterize regulatory interactions, non-coding elements, and structural variants.
3. Have a chance to ask questions during a live Q&A following the presentation.

In this webinar, Dr. Nallasivam Palanisamy, an associate scientist at Henry Ford Health, will discuss discovering novel biomarkers to improve targeted molecular therapy and monitoring therapeutic response in prostate cancer. Dr. Palanisamy has employed an innovative approach that entails unbiased comprehensive genomic and transcriptomic characterization via high-throughput massively parallel sequencing. He and his team have investigated the genetic underpinning in each tumor focus based on the molecular analysis of whole-mount radical prostatectomy specimens rather than a systematic sampling of the dominant module alone.

In this presentation, Dr. Palanisamy will share new insights on the impact of such molecular heterogeneity on the overall progression of the disease and its impact on early diagnosis and active surveillance.

Learning objectives:

• Methods for discovery of new molecular biomarkers in prostate cancer.
• Methods for analysis of tumor heterogeneity by combined dual immunohistochemistry and dual RNA in situ hybridization.
• Understanding tumor heterogeneity from a racial disparity perspective.
• Prostate cancer biomarkers — current perspective and future prospects.

The rise of genomics has transformed life sciences research, providing powerful tools for exploring all manner of biological questions. More recently, advances in protein analysis have made it feasible to analyze the proteome with a throughput and depth of coverage compatible with genomic techniques. The ability to measure proteins at such scale makes it possible to add proteomics to genetic analyses, allowing researchers to extract new insights from genomic datasets and mine additional value from the immense investments made in the field.

Please join us to hear four experts discuss the present challenges and opportunities for using proteomics to power interpretation of genomic data: Melissa Miller, director, human genetics at Pfizer; Chris Whelan, director, neuroscience data science at Johnson & Johnson; Benjamin Sun, head of biomarker genetics at Biogen; and Anders Mälarstig, director of human genetics and computational biomedicine at Pfizer and an affiliate researcher at the Karolinska Institute.

The panelists will discuss topics including how adding circulating protein data to genomic analyses can yield new understanding of complex biology, including around mechanisms of action of drugs and drug pathways and in identifying new biomarkers for drug candidates and drug repurposing.

PARP inhibitor indications have expanded over recent years due to promising data generated from clinical trials. There are several ways to test for HRD, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) is emerging as a leading technology that can assess both causal genes and genomic scarring in a single assay.

In this webinar, Nicole Pfarr of the Technical University of Munich will discuss her experience in evaluating Illumina’s TruSight Oncology 500 HRD research assay in her laboratory, the assay performance, and the results of a comparative analysis of samples from high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) previously tested by gold-standard HRD test from Myriad and several other molecular assays.

The speaker will discuss:

• Homologous recombination repair mechanisms. 
• Genetic mutations in HR-deficient ovarian cancer. 
• HRD utility in breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer.
• A concordance study leveraging different molecular assays.