Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference Wrap-up

February 15th, 2010 by Nancy Miller Latimer, M.S.

The 2009 Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference blasted off like a rocket with John Crowley’s  keynote, “When Drug Research is Personal.”  His family’s struggle is the inspiration for the motion picture Extraordinary Measures.  It was a profoundly moving experience to witness this father’s story of his family’s search for a cure for Pompe disease.  This journey eventually led to the founding of Novazyme Pharmaceuticals.    This is the kind of story that encourages us at both the human and scientific level.

I had a really tough time choosing which talks to attend but mostly settled on Molecular Diagnostics, Personalized Diagnostics, Cancer Profiling and Pathways, and Informatics Systems.  It was painful to miss the RNA Interfere, Cancer Biologics, and Translational Medicine sessions.  Many talks totally rocked.  Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order.  These talks come to mind because the material was fascinating, the delivery was exceptional, and they were all in areas for which I have a passionate scientific interest.

  • Single Molecule Real Time Biology: New technologies Enabling a More Complete Characterization of Disease Biology, Eric Schadt, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Pacific Biosciences
  • The Onco-SNP and Cancer Risk: microRNA Binding Site Polymorphisms as Biomarkers, Joanne B. Weidhaas, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Therapeutic Radiology, Yale University
  • Expression Based Patient Stratification for Cancer Prognostics, Peter J. van der Spek, Ph.D., Department of Bioinformatics, Erasmus MC – Medical Faculty
  • Consumers and Their Genomes, Brian Naughton, Ph.D., Founding Scientist, 23andMe
  • Systematic Discovery of Cancer Gene Fusions using Paired End Transcriptome Sequencing, Chandan Kumar, Ph.D., Michigan Center for Translational Pathology, University of Michigan
  • Enterprise Scientific Workflow Environment Drives Innovation, Daniel J. Chin, Ph.D., Senior Principal Research Scientist, Roche Palo Alto

This year I presented a poster on biomarkers ala Pipeline Pilot™, attended talks, and caught up with professional colleagues.  The Outrageous Character awards affectionately (and respectfully) go to Eric Schadt and Peter van der Spek.  The Thank You award goes to Daniel for his kind words about our work together.  The Exquisite Explanation awards go Joanne and Chandan.  They did an amazing job of bridging any gaps in the audience’s varied background by presenting technical concepts in essential simplicity—truly beautiful.  Brian gets the award for my Favorite DTC Genetics Company.  I have spent many hours studying my own SNPs data (and that of my family members) thanks to 23andme.   I have derived much pleasure from connecting with relatives, all over the world, that I found through the 23andme site.   I am very grateful that I was able to get this type of genetic information AND the raw data, too.

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miRNA and Your Microarray

December 10th, 2009 by Nancy Miller Latimer, M.S.

As a product manager, I help map out where we move next to support omics-based research within our Pipeline Pilot™ collections.  An area of great research interest is the role of microRNA (miRNA) in understanding disease pathways, diagnosis of diseases, and possible treatments.  miRNA and small interfering RNA (siRNA) are gene products that collectively comprise a group of small nucleotides called RNA interference (RNAi).  These gene products bind to other cellular RNA products that up or down regulate gene activity which, in turn, impact the proteins that our bodies manufacture.  Proteins carry out the functions of life.  A specific miRNA, although only 20 or so nucleotides long, can impact the hundreds of genes and hence their protein products.

Our knowledge about these miRNAs is growing rapidly.  The number of miRNAs was less than 500 in May 2007; 9,539 in May 2009; and 10, 883 in Sep 2009.  The rate at which miRBase is growing at and the rate at which miRNA publications are proliferating, demonstrates the exponential growth in interest.

Nancys

We do know that miRNAs impact the immune system and cellular growth/development.  miRNAs appear to mostly turn down gene activity and are being studied for their role in cancer, cardiac, and mental illnesses.  [As an aside, I would say that the link to mental illness is sensible given the connections being proposed between infections and onset of schizophrenia or PANDAS with tics, to name a few.]

This week’s Science (Science 27 November 2009: 1284-1287) magazine contained a product summary for various technologies that are currently used for commercial miRNA microarrays:  microfluidics, electronics, and Tailored DNA.   This product summary conveniently lists several major players along with their websites, which you may find interesting.

Our omics R&D team creates component “readers” for various technology platforms to facilitate ease of analysis.  I would be very interested in knowing which technology you feel is the most reliable now, and which you see as most promising 3 years from now.  It appears that each technology has its own strength and weaknesses and the utility is also strongly based on the use case.  I welcome your comments.

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