January 18, 2017 | 11 am to 12 pm EST

Sponsored by

Webinar Description:

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an aggressive subtype of lung cancer associated with poor survival outcomes. A greater understanding of the molecular profile of this disease is essential for development of novel targeted therapies. Situations can arise in molecular profiling where invasive tissue biopsy poses an unacceptable risk to patient health and may be detrimental to patient prognosis. Furthermore, the inability to undergo multiple resections may clinically hinder patients as well as preclude them from clinical trial enrollment. As SCLC is rarely treated by surgery and few specimens are available for molecular characterization, there is a need for a readily available, noninvasive method to characterize biomarkers.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the emerging role for ctDNA profiling in the cancer care continuum and drug development
• Evaluate liquid biopsy approaches as noninvasive tools for biomarker discovery and characterization
• Discuss a study utilizing liquid biopsy tools in SCLC

Speakers:

John K. Simmons, PhD

Director
Translational Science and Diagnostics

Personal Genome Diagnostics

At Personal Genome Diagnostics, John focuses broadly on biomarker discovery and diagnostic development partnerships with pharma/biotech. Previously, John was at the National Cancer Institute where his research focused on identifying novel therapeutic strategies for multiple myeloma through chemical genomic approaches with a particular focus on drug combinations. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology with honors from American University and Ph.D. in Tumor Biology from Georgetown University as part of the NIH Graduate Partnership Program. As a post-doctoral fellow, he received the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) Research Fellow award to support his work in developing systems-level approaches for drug combination identification and prioritization.

Sunita Badola

Director
Functional Genomics

Takeda Pharmaceuticals

Sunita Badola is currently employed as the Director of Functional Genomics at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA. She has a strong record of scientific innovation in the field of genetics and genomics with more than 18 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. Recently, her focus has been on developing, implementing, and managing a virtual next-generation sequencing data pipeline for Takeda R&D. In her previous role as part of the Translational Medicine group at Takeda for 5 years, she applied Genomics and novel technologies to develop biomarker assays for oncology clinical programs. Before Takeda, she worked at Amgen for 5 years where she developed the NGS platform to support oncology clinical programs. Before Amgen she worked at Millennium pharmaceuticals for 7 years in the target ID and validation group.