BREAKOUT DISCUSSIONS

TUESDAY 7 MAY
17:00 - 18:00

Biomarkers for Immunotherapy

TABLE 1: Clinical Utility of ctDNA as Predictive IO Marker

Moderator: Helen Rizos, PhD, Head, Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia

  • Impact of tumour load, location and activity on ctDNA levels
  • Sensitivity of ctDNA
  • New technologies for ctDNA analysis

TABLE 2: Toward Leveraging Publicly Accessible Clinical Trials Data- Sharing, Dissemination, and Repurposing

Moderator: Sanchita Bhattacharya, PhD, Bioinformatics Project Scientist, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California San Francisco, United States

  • Data sharing in clinical and translational science- Risk and Benefits
  • Data Standards for clinical trials data sharing
  • Data Reproducibility, reuse and repurposing- Challenges and Opportunities

TABLE 3: Multiplex Immunofluorescence in Clinical Practice

Moderator: Nicolas A. Giraldo-Castillo, MD, PhD, Pathology Resident, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, United States

  • What are the major challenges we are facing to standardize large-scale mIF stains in paraffin-embedded tissue?
  • How can we best optimize the stain and analysis of mIF?
  • How far are we from using mIF in daily clinical practice?

Advanced Diagnostics for Infectious Disease

TABLE 4: Application of MALDI-TOF MS and Nucleic-Acid Amplification to Microbiological and Virological Diagnosis

Moderator: Adriana Calderaro, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Clinical Microbiology, Unit of Microbiology and Virology, Department of Medicine and Surgery, University Hospital of Parma, Italy

  • Identification of viruses
  • Identification of bacteria and fungi
  • Identification of parasite

TABLE 5: Point-of-Care vs. Central Lab Testing

Moderator: Oliver Liesenfeld, MD, CMO, Inflammatix, United States

  • Point-of-care, point of impact, satellite and central lab
  • What are the clinical requirements/medical needs?
  • What are the assay/instrument requirements?
  • What about data flow, integration into electronic medical records?
  • Who performs the testing?
  • Who is in charge of quality control?

Enabling Technologies for Circulating Biomarkers

TABLE 6: How to Survive the in vitro Diagnostic Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2017/746)

Moderator: Michael Messenger, PhD, Head of Personalised Medicine and Health, Leeds Centre for Personalised Medicine and Health, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

  • What is IVDR and how does it differ from the current directive?
  • What are the implications of IVDR on healthcare systems and commercial test developers?
  • What is the community doing to prepare?

TABLE 7: Technological Advances for cfDNA and Other Circulating Biomarkers: Challenges and Strategies

Moderator: Jörg Tost, PhD, Director Laboratory for Epigenetics & Environment, Laboratory for Epigenetics & Environment, Centre National de Recherche en Génomique Humaine (CNRGH), CEA – Institut de Biologie Francois Jacob, France

  • What will be the technological platforms for the next generation of circulating biomarker assays?
  • What are key challenges for current assays?
  • Which biomarker to choose for nucleic acid analysis: circulating molecules vs. exosomes?

TABLE 8: Has ctDNA Won Over CTCs in the Clinical Space?

Moderator: Lorena Diéguez, PhD, Group Leader, Department of Life Sciences, Nano4Health Unit, Medical Devices Research Group, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, Portugal

  • What information can still be provided by CTCs that is not accessible by any other circulating biomarker in oncology?
  • What challenges do we face to implement functional studies on CTCs?
  • How can this information be applied in the clinic?

WEDNESDAY 8 MAY
18:05 - 19:05

Companion Diagnostics for Immuno-Oncology

TABLE 1: Open Innovation in Action

Moderator: Pierre Meulien, PhD, Executive Director, Innovative Medicines Initiative, Belgium

  • Extension of open innovation concept to general R&D ecosystem
  • Examples of successes of this principle
  • How open innovation can accelerate implementation of research outcomes in health systems

Clinical Applications of Circulating Biomarkers

TABLE 2: Potential of cfDNA as a Point-of-Care Marker in Emergency and Critical Care Settings

Moderator: Andrea Regner, MD, PhD, Professor, Cellular and Molecular Biology Applied to Health, Course of Medicine, Lutheran University of Brazil, Canoas, Brazil

  • Prognosis prediction in acute brain injuries;
  • Defining cutoff of cfDNA that favors high specificity for brain death outcome;
  • Clinical utility of cfDNA quantification in acute medical care scenarios.

TABLE 3: Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) as Biomarkers and Mediators of Oncologic Disease

Moderator: Bruno Costa-Silva, PhD, Systems Oncology, Group Leader, Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal

  • Isolation and characterization of EVs
  • Tumour- and Host-derived EVs
  • EVs heterogeneity
  • Emerging technologies for EVs studies

TABLE 4: Circulating Tumor Cells as Liquid Biopsy in Cancer Patients

Moderators: Catherine Alix-Panabieres, PhD, Assistant Professor; Director, Laboratory of Rare Human Circulating Cells (LCCRH), University Medical Centre of Montpellier, France

Klaus Pantel, MD, Professor, Chairman, Institute of Tumor Biology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany

  • Technology for CTC detection
  • Biology of CTCs
  • In vitro and in vivo expansion of CTCs: establishment of CTC lines
  • Clinical Relevance of CTCs