Biomarkers, CDx & Precision Medicine 2026

MARINA BLECK, Principal Scientist, Boehringer Ingelheim

Marina discussed the use of multi omics for faster Faster Target-to- Disease Link (T2DL) with increased confidence and how they can leverage Spatial Biology to enhance the ability to derive insight from human disease tissues.  Finally the Importance of FFPE Tissue Quality for Spatial Biology was discussed with the use of QC scoring to determine which FFPE tissue gives the best spatial transcriptomics results.

EMRE ARSLAN, Takeda

Emre Arslan from Takeda gave a talk about the use of Spatial Biology as a discovery pathway. First of all providing an update on the current landscape for spatial technologies then analysing how spatial technologies can be used in clinical trial design - such as the ability to identify previously unknown cell types, interactions and microenvironments and providing an ideal foundation for training better AI models. 

JASMINE PLUMMER, Director, St Jude Children's Research Hosptial

Jasmine Plummer's day 2 keynote focused on Single cell into spatial and beyond.  "The reason we are in this room is because it’s cutting edge" which is why the single cell and spatial field growing exponentially.

Future directions for the technology include Low throughput, clinical trials, other organisms, more tissue types, epigenomics

JUN WANG, Associate Professor, Multiplex Biotechnology Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University

"Simpler but more powerful than flow and imaging cytometry"

MIST Technology provides100 times more information than flow cytometry and currently the highest multiplexity is up to 500 markers/ cell.

PRIYA CHOCKALINGAM, Vice President, Head of Clinical BioAnalytics & Translational Sciences, Beam Therapeutics

Priya's talk focused on Genome Editing Technologies for Gene & Cell Therapy and how cell & gene therapies require a specialized regulatory approach compared to other modalities. Appropriate assessments should therefore be put in place in both nonclinical and clinical stages to address safety concerns.

Various methods to assess off-target editing effects have evolved in the last decade. However, limitations remain in balancing accuracy vs sensitivity of these new techniques.

The direct assessment of off-target effects in vivo and in patients is particularly challenging.

Novel single-cell technologies enable quantitation/co-occurrence of on-/off-target editing through patient time-course of treatment

ZORA MODRUSAN, Senior Director NGS, Genentech

Zora focused on both key insights and future directions of single cell RNA-Seq.  scRNA-seq technologies were evaluated and the differences in performance across various metrics such as sensitivity, throughput and cost were compared across different systems.

The Overloading And unpacKing (OAK) method provides a reliable solution for large-scale molecular profiling that incorporates multiple data modalities.

Moving forward they will continue to evaluate the latest scRNA-seq kits to understand differences and guide optimal performance. Zora would also like to enhance OAK's capabilities by integrating additional modalities and applying the platform to a wide range of biological systems.