ASHG 2016 was an exciting event for us. We loved the beautiful city of Vancouver, BC, and our calendars were packed with speakerships, poster presentations and meetings with peers and colleagues. We also announced our new Sample-to-Insight solutions for liquid biopsies and hereditary diseases — which included our bioinformatics solutions, and our booth was buzzing with people who wanted to learn more. Our public-facing ASHG activities were a germane reflection of the event’s overarching theme: “Sharing Discoveries. Shaping our Future.” Over the course of five days during ASHG, QIAGEN Bioinformatics staff delivered six separate in-booth presentations, five poster presentations and an educational workshop focused on liquid biopsy, RNA-seq, and hereditary diseases.
If you missed them, or would like to see them again, you can see Jean-Noel Billaud’s presentation on an Integrative approach to biomarker discovery: Comparative analysis of two cancers using genomics and transcriptomics from RNA sequencing data here, and Helge Martens’ on Rapid identification and prioritization of pathogenic variants associated with anomalies of the kidneys and urinary tract here.
We were not the only ones who were busy during ASHG. The Broad Institute’s new beta of its Genome Aggregation Database, or “gnomAD” was announced, which boasts information from 126,216 human exomes and 15,136 whole human genomes and doubles the number of exomes available from the ExAC population database. This news resonated strongly with us because we’re championing similar efforts with the Allele Frequency Community — our opt-in community resource which encourages the sharing of anonymized, pooled frequency statistics among laboratories. The industry’s continued drumbeat toward precision medicine was another recurring theme, going hand-in-hand with the strong focus on Canada’s efforts to adopt its own version of 2008’s U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. We also saw continued buzz around CRISPR technology, with several ASHG sessions dedicated to both the implications and obligations inherent in genome editing technology.
We hope you enjoyed your time at ASHG and we hope to see you soon. If you have questions about liquid biopsy or related solutions, do not hesitate to contact us.
Our next big event will be AMP 2016 in Charlotte, NC from Nov. 10-12 and the NGS Congress in London from Nov. 10-11. Keep an eye on this site for updates about what we’ll be doing there. We hope you enjoyed your time at ASHG and we hope to see you soon. If you have questions about liquid biopsy or related solutions, do not hesitate to contact us.