Dr Sandip Patel to Speak on Biomarkers for Cancer Immunotherapy: Beyond PD-L1

San Diego, CA, November 22, 2015 --(PR.com)-- The Biomarker Conference, organized by MnM Conferences, will be held on 18 - 19 February 2016 in San Diego-CA, USA. At the conference experts from pharma, bio - pharma companies and research institutes ​will be gathering to discuss emerging pathways and breakthroughs in biomarker discovery and successful validation in consort with the regulatory guidelines and evolving cost-effective technologies that can help increase success rates in novel biomarker discovery and approvals for clinical utility.

Speaking at the conference are organizations such as Roche, Pfizer, National Biomarker Development Alliance, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Eisai, NCI/NIH, Bayer HealthCare, Harvard Medical School, The Wistar Institute, Merck Serono, Janssen Research & Development, FDA | CDRH and Astrazeneca. Some of the key topics discussions include regulatory aspects for prognostic and companion diagnostics, updates on personalized medicine, preclinical detection of Alzheimer’s disease with blood biomarkers, emerging applications and methods to discover molecular diagnostic markers, regulatory challenges, cancer biomarker validation for clinical applications, lessons learned from Next Generation Sequencing using liquid biopsies, Overcoming challenges associated with biomarker applications in clinical trials, methodologies for data management, bioinformatics and biostatistics methodologies and biomarkers in diagnosis and early detection to name a few.

Dr Sandip Patel – Assistant Professor, Cancer Immunotherapy Program, UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center is one of the key speakers at the conference. He will be speaking on Biomarkers for Cancer Immunotherapy: Beyond PD-L1 that will discuss topics such as predictive biomarker development, immunotherapeutic biomarker development, biomarker-driven combinatorial therapy and future of cancer immunotherapy among others.

Talking about the growing development in Biomarker technologies, Dr Patel said, “The myriad of technologies across disciplines that allow for a more precise understanding of the tumour microenvironment, with the goal of better predicting which patients will respond to with immunotherapies. The number of technologies now available to better help patients is truly amazing.”

Speaking about his work, he said, "I am currently an assistant professor at UCSD Moores Cancer Center focusing on immunotherapeutic biomarker development and early phase clinical trials with combinatorial immunotherapy. I am focused on methods combining immunohistochemical analysis of the tumour microenvironment, tumour sequencing and neoantigen prediction, and transcriptional signatures of response. Additionally, am interested in peripheral blood biomarkers of immunotherapeutic response and toxicity. Overall, I have a longstanding interest in oncology, and in particular, an interest in developing anti-cancer therapies that overcome traditional resistance mechanisms related to immune evasion, with a focus on combinatorial cancer therapy involving targeted therapy, cellular therapy, and immunotherapeutics."

When asked about the latest challenges in the biomarker domain Dr Patel told, “Multiple disparate PD-L1 IHC assays with varying cut-offs which are companion diagnostics to a variety of different agents. Active studies such as BLUEPRINT hope to harmonize these assays across diagnostic platforms. A lack of peripheral blood biomarkers of immunotherapeutic response limits the ability to predict which patients will respond to immunotherapy.”

The conference will be an excellent opportunity for delegates to listen to experts like Dr Patel about the latest advancements in biomarkers and also share experiences with peers. The conference is co-located with the Genome Editing & Engineering Conference and NGS Data Analysis and Informatics Conference.