Without a doubt, COVID-19 has changed the view of how the world should approach pathogen surveillance, detection, and containment. The last one and half years have been one of the most life-changing experiences for all of us and our healthcare systems and will be covered in January 26-28’s PMWC 2022 Silicon Valley conference.

In reflecting on these recent and ongoing experiences we once again are reminded that data is the most important asset when it comes to making informed decisions. Data is the foundation to accelerate and optimize therapeutic, diagnostic, and vaccine development, to ultimately reduce the burden on our healthcare system, and to save lives. Data can be of various types and can include pathogen sequence, phenotype, pathology, drug response, survey, and mobile device data combined with various other detection data, including data generated via metagenomic sequencing, pan-antibody panel screening, or highly multiplexed CRISPR technologies.

Charles Chiu (Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases at University of California, San Francisco): “The point of doing surveillance is to find these rare variants and, in doing so, make sure they continue to be rare. If we do it now, we can hopefully still prevent these variants from blowing up and becoming the predominant lineage. That would be a disaster.”

Pathogen Outbreak Surveillance: Certainly, large-scale genomic sequencing efforts are of ever increasing importance especially in the context of early pathogen detection, disease outbreak prevention, and for establishing a predictive and efficient public health response. Rapid generation and access to genomic sequence data for viruses and other pathogens, which could cause a pandemic or serious outbreak, enables the tracking of variants and emerging pathogens (e.g., SARS-CoV-2, influenza, enterovirus D68, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, etc.), and thus the expedient development of diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics essential to supporting public health responses.

The PMWC team understands the vital importance of pathogen outbreak surveillance and for that reason is planning several sessions around this most important theme at our upcoming in-person PMWC 2022 Silicon Valley. Some of the new sessions we will be focusing on include:
1. New technologies for agnostic detection of pathogens, and their incorporation into clinical and public health laboratories
2. Large-scale genomic sequencing efforts for tracking emerging pathogens and variants
3. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance using metagenomics
4. Pathogen data integration tools for predictive analysis

Sharon Peacock (Professor of Public Health and Microbiology in the Department of Medicine | Executive Director and Chair of the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium): “There are going to be new variants arising in the future and we’re going to have to adapt our response to these as we go along. Sequencing and vaccine development are key partners. I suspect that this is going to be ongoing throughout my life and beyond. Of concern is that we don’t have global coverage, so we do not have insights on global scale in terms of new variants.

PMWC 2022 Silicon Valley highlights:
• 3-Day in-person conference with over 400 speakers
• 7-Track program, including Emerging Therapeutics, AI/M: & Data Sciences, Diagnostics in Clinical Practice, Molecular Profiling – From Research to Clinic, COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2, Women’s Health, PGx, Liquid Biopsy and the Microbiome
• Company showcases
• Award Ceremony honoring Katalin Karikó, Stephen Kingsmore, Albert Bourla, Tal Zaks and Stephen Hoge
o past Pioneer and Luminary Awardees include James Allison, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna, Anthony Fauci, Jay Flatley, and Eric Ugur Sahin, Özlem Türeci, and others.
• Over 90 exhibits by vendors and organizations.
• COVID Rules: Masks required. Show proof or either vaccination or negative covid test (x<72hours) -PMWC Pittsburgh was 100% masked, 99% vaccinated / 1% testing covid negative.

Please join us on January 26-28 for PMWC 2022 Silicon Valley In-Person Conference. We are focusing on getting the different stakeholders into one place to touch on the different directions and developments of precision medicine and pathogen surveillance to hear first-hand how recent advances, opportunities, and challenges will shape medicine and the future of healthcare. If you weren’t there you missed an exciting conference last month in Pittsburgh, I hope you can join us in January!

Yours truly,
Tal Behar
President, PMWC -Precision Medicine World Conference
PMWC Jan. 26-28, 2022