We are living through a time of rapid change in the clinical genetics laboratory, though at times it may appear that change doesn’t occur fast enough given the challenges within the existing healthcare system. At the recent Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference held in San Francisco March 7 through 11 2016, here are a few summary highlights of the conference.

The Keystone Symposia is an organization with 44 years of history on specialized topics across the fields of molecular and cellular biology. This week in Banff, Alberta, Canada is a Keystone Symposia conference called The Cancer Genome, along with a joint meeting on Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Their Twitter description (@KeystoneSymp) describes the Keystone organization as “A catalyst for accelerating life science discovery and connecting scientists within and across disciplines at symposia worldwide”.

Recently, the FDA upped the ante in the ongoing debate over its desire to regulate laboratory developed tests (LDTs) with the release of a report detailing the ‘real and potential harms to patients and to public health’ arising from LDTs. This debate has been heating up for several years now—not coincidentally with the emergence of precision medicine and the rapid adoption of data-intensive tools such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and the growing pipelines of targeted therapeutics. One might argue that the horse has already left the barn and the FDA are trying to corral it back in.

It is hard to believe that next-generation sequencing has only been around for a little over ten years, but has had a profound impact on many frontiers of basic and applied genetics. To contrast the first-generation (Sanger sequencing by capillary electrophoresis) and the next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches, we provide you with this infographic.

The science of metrology is tightly coupled with biological science, in tandem with biology becoming less descriptive and more quantitative over the past half-century. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the US Department of Commerce, has been established to ‘promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life’.

In 2011, the National Academy of Science published the results of a year-long committee effort called ‘Toward Precision Medicine: Building a Knowledge Network for Biomedical Research and a New Taxonomy of Disease’. This committee was charged to explore the feasibility and need to develop a new taxonomy of human disease based upon molecular biology, with the concept that with an explosion of molecular data about individuals with disease, there was a great untapped opportunity to use these data to improve health. FLICKR, JOHN GOODE

In this video interview, SeraCare’s Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Russell Garlick shares some background about SeraCare’s history of manufacturing controls and reference materials for infectious disease diagnostics, and how advances in Precision Medicine reveal a need for similar materials for the fields of oncology and maternal health.