LaJolla, CA August 20th 2014 – Today, Illumina organized a seminar entitled “Illumina’s Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in the Clinic” at the Hilton Torrey Pines in LaJolla, CA. The conference was attended by a broad range of participants: physicians, NGS service providers, large pharma companies (including Pfizer), and staff researchers interested in launching a new clinical genomic center abroad.This blog entry briefly paraphrases some of the interesting comments what we’ve heard on (and off) the stage. For additional comments, feel free to refer to #ILMNUGM:

• Diane Lince (speaker): “Clinical NGS is gaining global adoption, from the UK with the 100K genome project to China where Illumina has helped enabled Berry Genetics serve some of the 2M woman per year categorized as high risk pregnancies.”
• Erick Lin (speaker): “One benefit of NGS that stakeholders often forget about is platform consolidation. You can run tests that were previously performed using real time PCR, Sanger sequencing or pyrosequencing on a single machine.”
• Naomi O’grady (speaker): “Today, there are no approved companion diagnostic (CDx) tests that use NGS. Illumina is working with Amgen to bring a test for Vectibix on the market. In the future, we believe that NGS will be a tool of choice for CDx. We will stay with panels for a while, but it may move to whole exome sequencing (WES) in the long term.”
• Stacey Seeloff: “Cystic Fibrosis was historically considered a Caucasian disease, but this will change. By 2020, the majority of the U.S. may be of mixed background. […] Illumina offers tests that cover the lifespan of an individual, even before s/he is born, from carrier screening, to preimplantation diagnosis, NIPT testing, newborn screening, and a panel of tests for chronic disease testing.”
• Mya Thomae (speaker): “FDA informed congress of its intention to regulate laboratory developed tests (LDTs). This will now be a long conversation. It will probably be a couple of years before we see a finalized draft guidance. After guidance comes into place, labs will still have time to comply. As usual, FDA will go after ‘intended use’, so oncology (and companion diagnostics) will likely be the first therapeutic areas to be regulated”
• Sarah Murray (speaker): “We are implementing clinical NGS at UCSD. We are still very much a small volume clinical lab. 50 tests have been ordered and 39 returned. Right now, we offer a 47 gene solid tumor panel. We intend to offer 3 more tests by the end of the year: a 100 gene hematologic tumor panel, a 300 gene solid tumor panel, and a 100 gene cardiomyopathy panel. Further down the road, we intend to offer WES and WGS tests.”
• One Attendee: ““I am helping with the creation of the Centro Privado Internacional de Medicina Personalizada, CEPIMP, in Argentina.” Said Dr. Fernando Lopez-Diaz. “Through the support of local visionary investors and through strategic alliances with leading academic institutions in the U.S. and Argentina, the goal of this center is to develop the field of personalized therapies in Argentina for cancer patient care at a manageable cost, while enhancing biomedical research in the country. I am here today to learn more about recent advances in the clinic.”
• One (anonymous) attendee: “Illumina is really crushing it. A couple of years ago, we used 3 platforms. Now, we migrated everything to our HiSeq and MiSeq platforms.”

Author: Stephane Budel, Partner at DeciBio, LLCConnect with Stephane Budel on Google+https://plus.google.com/+StephaneBudel