reatch pitch: The Future of Medical Diagnostics

Medical Diagnostics - From DNA to proteins to real-time immunoassays

Complicated machines like jet engines contain a vast amount of sensors that stream data in real-time to the manufacturer to identify problems before failure can occur. This is in great contrast to the way we take care of the most complicated machine mankind knows - the human body. Medical tests are only performed when symptoms are already there and even in the case of mammography screening, the benefits are usually low, because up to 70% of the cases have benign lesions that still have to go through harsh treatments such as chemotherapy. Another example is personalized cancer therapy, where biopsies are screened for mutations and the cancer is treated according to the type of mutations that it has acquired. However, even cancers with the same mutations that have been identified as biomarkers, have very different protein expression profiles, which results in sometimes very different therapy response. The problem is that single biomarkers are not sufficient to classify a disease. The future lies therefore in a simple way of highly multiplexed protein quantification for various diseases and to define a healthy human on a molecular level. In this talk, the efforts from both academia and industry to takle these challenges were discussed together with the progress that was made in recent years, what is available to us to date and what is likely to be possible in the next years.

Mitwirkende

Gesamtleitung

Servan Grüninger

Apéro & Saalvorbereitung

Martin Roszkowski (Leitung)

Werbung & Medien

Fabienne Odermatt (Leitung)

Fotografie & Film

Joel Lüthi (Leitung)

Sara von Salis