Biography
Alexander Dobrovic Ph.D. leads the Translational Genomics Laboratory at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. His lab has a focus on personalized medicine including both research, and developing and implementing innovative, clinically relevant affordable methodologies. His lab is accredited for medical testing for tissue and liquid biopsy assays for mutations both for diagnostics and cancer monitoring. DNA methylation assays (BRCA1, MLH1, and MGMT) and solid cancer fusions using next-generation sequencing. He is a committee member of the annual Thomas Ashworth Liquid Biopsy Symposium and the Australian Genomic Cancer Clinical Trials Initiative.
Frequently, markers identified from NGS profiled tumors are translated into ddPCR assays which enable precision monitoring of a patient over the course of disease and even after health has been restored. This session will illustrate with a number of clinical use cases how dPCR (as demonstrated by ddPCR) is a fit-for-purpose technology approach for serial monitoring of multiple markers in cancer patients. This includes a diversity of marker types such as SNV’s and indels (both driver and passenger), and gene fusions from both truncal rearrangements and drivers of tumorigenesis.