We had a chance to sit down with Dr. Mike Pellini, Managing Partner of Section 32, Chairman of Foundation Medicine & PMWC 2020 Silicon Valley Program Chair, who shared his thoughts on what is needed in order for precision medicine to deliver promised benefits to the healthcare sector.Following are highlights from the interview:

“The call to action is to make sure that the industry and the payer community representatives are collaborating much earlier in the process.”

We are all in this industry for a reason, to impact human health. The faster that we can do it, the greater impact we have on human health. Let us start these discussions early, and let us set some goals for what this data needs to look like for the payers early. We have seen this latter scenario play out often in the past – especially true on the diagnostic side – with payers engaged too late saying, “Oh, great effort, but you missed the goalpost. You have to go back and try it all over again.” There’s no reason we should be doing that in 2020. We should be communicating much earlier. We should be working together to set the goals, so if the studies achieve them, there should be very few questions left about whether or not something is A) cost effective and B) able to get reimbursed. At the PMWC 2020, we will hear from payers who have been actively investing in companies developing innovating lab services and technologies. Read more about this session here.

“When we can bring together the best of the drug and diagnostic development world with the best and the brightest in the machine learning/AI world, then we truly work together as a team.”

That is where I believe some of the most exciting technologies and outcomes will emerge. I think we are going down a good path here. Even some of the brilliant scientists/computer scientists who showed an early entrance into AI on the healthcare side and who believed that there were shortcuts, have learned that we all need to work together and complement one another. That is where I believe some of the most exciting technologies and outcomes will emerge.

“Patient centricity is undoubtedly a key area.”

We have access to information, access to products, and access to expertise at our fingertips in every area of our lives today except for medicine. I believe these technologies over the next few years, through the next decade, are going to continue to drive this notion of patient centricity in healthcare in a way that we have envisioned before but have never really been able to execute. In parallel, we will continue to see these accelerations on the development of therapies and diagnostics, and the utilization of data in a much more efficient manner which will drive these discoveries into the clinic. We will even influence the emergence of disease well before that molecular change results in something that we call a disease today. I firmly believe this coming decade is going to be the decade of cancer screening, and even more broadly, just disease screening. By the end of the decade – or perhaps by the middle – we will see many screening tests become a routine part of medical care.

Read the full interview on the PMWC Blog.

Dr. Mike Pellini will share his invaluable insights from the field at PMWC 2020 Silicon Valley, January 21-24th in the Santa Clara Convention Center.

I would like to reveal to you the just published 400+ Speaker PMWC January 21-24th Program. Sessions span data science and artificial intelligence, immunotherapy, clinical genomics, profiling in the clinic, the microbiome, new technologies, and a platform for a select number of cutting edge companies to present their innovative new tech that intends to disrupt healthcare. These Showcases include:

⦁ AI and Data Sciences – chaired by Stan Huff, Intermountain Healthcare
⦁ Clinical and Research Tools – chaired by Chhaya Shadra, Verana Health
⦁ Clinical Dx – chaired by Alek Rajkovic, UCSF Health
⦁ Emerging Therapeutics – chaired by Theresa LaValle, Parker Institute
⦁ Genomic profiling – chaired by Chris Cournoyer, N-of-One
⦁ Health Monitoring – chaired by Mike Snyder, Stanford
⦁ Microbial profiling – chaired by Manoj Dadlani, COSMOSID

You will hear from Dr. Pellini in the two sessions he is chairing: Implementing Precision Medicine in Community Hospitals & Moving Into Venture Capital.

If you want to attend but have questions, please reach out to me.

And if you Register by August 29 the rates are 40% off. Don’t miss out!

Kind regards,

Tal & the PMWC team