IBC's Discovery2Diagnostics 2008 event in San Diego, CA was a fantastic intermingling of intensive scientific and technical presentations and discussions with broader interactive discussions on everything from how to engage with regulatory authorities on diagnostics development, planning for reimbursement success to fast track commercialization strategies for microarray-based diagnostics.

Poster Winners
Over a lively afternoon, conference participants exercised their electoral muscles as they voted for the best poster in the D2D 2008 poster competition. The consensus revealed a clear winner - the poster entitled "Methods for improving genomic DNA labeling yields for array CGH," presented by Daniel Baker of Amgen. Daniel will have the honor of presenting his work next year during a regular session at Discovery2Diagnostics 2009.

Event Highlights
A series of keynote presentations touched on a range of hot-topics on:

• How biomarker discovery may be informed by systems biology - Global Reconstruction of the Human Metabolic Network based on Genomic and Bibliomic Data
  Bernhard Palsson, Ph.D., Galetti Professor of Bioengineering and Adjunct Professor Medicine, University of California at San Diego
• RNAi related detection and analysis - Evidence of Expanded Regulatory Activity for Animal microRNAs
  Isidore Rigoutsos, Ph.D., Manager, Bioinformatics & Pattern Disc. Group, Comp. Biology Center, Deep Computing Institute, IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center
• Regulatory and reimbursement considerations in molecular diagnostics developments - Regulation of Emerging Diagnostics
  Richard Naples, Vice President, Corporate Regulatory Affairs, BD Medical - Pharmaceutical Systems
• Use of biomarkers in trials - Application of Biomarkers for Early Decision Making and Patient Selection
  Scott Patterson, Ph.D., Executive Director, Medical Sciences, Amgen Inc. and
  Assessing Genetic Risk Factors for Common Human Diseases
  Dietrich Stephan, Ph.D., Co-founder and CSO, Navigenics; Director & Senior Investigator, Neurogenomics Division, Translational Genomics Research Institute
• Best fit methods for developing molecular diagnostics in today's business environment - Democratizing Molecular Diagnostics: the Challenge of Implementing New Technology
  David Persing, MD, Ph.D., Executive Vice President, Chief Medical and Technology Officer, Cepheid

Plenary keynote speaker a big draw
We were especially delighted to have, as our Tuesday evening plenary keynote speaker, Dr. Aleksandra Walczak, Ph.D., of the Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University talk on "Learning design principles from noisy small gene regulatory networks" It was refreshing to hear a new voice from another discipline (physics) on this complex topic.