San Diego Biomarkers Conference: Highlights

The Biomarkers Congress in San Diego was held over two days, heralding meetings with local California-based contacts as well as introducing us to many new people and companies from further afield who attended this year. We had the chance to meet with nearly 50 representatives from different companies in two days; the scope of research and different areas of work being carried out by those we met was fantastic to hear and learn more about.

Dr Max Bylesjo, our Technical Director, spoke on the first day of the conference. There was a fantastic turnout for his talk with over 60 people in attendance. Please get in touch with us now if you would like a copy of his presentation.

Talk Highlights

Our team were kept busy with meetings but did manage to catch a couple of talks over the two days.

Dr Rawan Tarawneh, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Ohio State University, focussed on Alzheimer’s disease during her talk. One in three elderly people dies with dementia-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s. For businesses, this causes $230 million of lost wages yearly; this includes reasons such as taking time off to care for relatives and early onset of the disease from preventing work.

Both amyloid and tau proteins are key to the progression of Alzheimer’s. Any issues with the two proteins cause neuronal loss which leads to a patient presenting with Alzheimer’s symptoms. A primary marker of the disease are neurofibrillary tangles (NFT), masses of hyperphosphorylated tau protein. NFT pathology parallels with the neurodegeneration stage of a patient. The pathology of Alzheimer’s advanced by type, using ATN biomarker groupings; β amyloid deposition, pathologic tau, and neurodegeneration. With higher levels of pathologic tau, the chance of Alzheimer’s disease progressing in a patient increases to 85%.

The second talk, by Dr Ginette Serrero of A&G Pharma, focussed on their ‘theranostic’ approach – a combination of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches focussing on patient-centered care. At A&G, the precision antibody division helps to develop, produce and characterise monoclonal antibodies. Alongside this, their R&D oncology theranostic division develops therapies, which are soon to be starting Phase 1 trials.

A&G have identified targets critical to tumorigenesis using translational cancer models, precision antibody technology and functional target mining. Their targets are overexpressed by cancer cells, secreted by tumour cells and are required by cancer cells to survive. They are also associated with standard-of-care resistance in many cancer types. A&G now have the ability to predict the reoccurrence of certain cancers, including breast and prostate, and monitor disease state in real-time. This could represent an opportunity for risk prediction moving forward.

Overall

Our CEO, Dr Sarah Lynagh, commented, “This event continues to grow with this year’s attendance greater than last year, supported by the fantastic venue and organisation offered by the Oxford Global team. It was pleasing to see so many other Scottish-based companies presenting their services so far from home. As always it was great to catch up with many of our clients who are based in the area as well as new contacts from all over the US. We look forward to continuing those discussions in the coming weeks.”

The San Diego Biomarkers Congress also heralded the first outing for our brand-new banner as well as showcasing our recently released whitepaper on the microbiome – “An Introduction to the Microbiome: Challenges and Resolutions for Research”.