I’m excited to be at the Annual AACR meeting at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA. AACR is my favorite scientific meeting because each year I am inspired by the remarkable research presented and leave the conference feeling I’ve learned an incredible amount in just a few days.

Friends of Cancer Research aims to better understand the impact of assay variation on clinical outcomes, align standards, and define best practices for tumor mutational burden assessment. Harmonization of methods to quantify TMB will facilitate robust biomarker development and optimize clinical utilization and treatment decision-making.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized how assay developers, laboratories, and clinicians are diagnosing, treating, and monitoring disease. As NGS panels grow to include an increasing number of important biomarkers, so too must the reference standards used for development, validation, and routine QC.

Labs that demonstrate best practice clinical next-generation sequencing (NGS) quality management programs utilize positive run controls, designed for this purpose, to monitor assay analytical performance across each step of the clinical NGS workflow. Common parameters for assessing the analytical performance of a clinical NGS run include sensitivity (true positives), specificity (true negatives),

It is very likely that on your last flight the turbofan engines were controlled by full authority digital engine controls – FADECs for short. FADECs have played a significant role in keeping airline ticket prices low (except during holidays) by continually adjusting engine parameters so that the engine operates with maximum fuel efficiency and within operational limits, allowing pilots to focus on other tasks.

At the recently-concluded 2018 AMP Meeting, researchers at the New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH) and Weill Cornell Medical Center (WCMC) presented a poster1 on the validation of an Oncomine™ cell-free DNA Lung Assay using ctDNA NGS standards developed by SeraCare (Seraseq® ctDNA v2 Reference Materials),2

Neurotrophic tyrosine receptor kinases (NTRK) can become abnormally fused to other genes resulting in growth signals that can lead to cancer in many organs of the human body. TRK gene fusion-based cancers are rare but present in pediatric and adult cancers such as lung, thyroid, colon, etc. (see, e.g., Figure 1).

“So as everyone here is aware, I’m sure, detection of circulating tumor DNA is challenging. There’s very little of it, to start with.” Hardly a revolutionary statement by Tony Godfrey, PhD, (Associate Chair, Surgical Research and Associate Professor of Surgery, Boston University School of Medicine) but an important acknowledgement from a leading expert of the difficulty faced by laboratorians

If you’ve attended the AMP Annual Meeting over the years or seen any of the headlines it generates, you know how next-generation sequencing-based assays are becoming indispensable diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive tools for a growing number of disease states. But just as important as the newest biomarker or latest chemistry – but seemingly less headline-worthy – are NGS quality control and standardization.

Of the many fantastic posters presented at AMP’s Annual Meeting in San Antonio, two concerning NGS-based liquid biopsy assays stood out. Both presenters described how their organizations are working to reliably detect pathogenic variants at extremely low allele frequencies – efforts critical to the clinical adoption of NGS-based liquid biopsy assays.