Nicholas Dracopoli, VP at Janssen to Keynote at GTC's Biomarker Summit, San Francisco, March 20-22

MONROVIA, CA, December 08, 2012 (Press-News.org) Nicholas Dracopoli, Vice President and Head of Oncology Biomarkers at Janssen R&D will give a plenary keynote presentation entitled "Why So Few Companion Diagnostics? The Difficulty of Translating Biological Data into Predictive Biomarkers" at GTC's Biomarker Summit 2013, taking place in San Francisco, CA on March 20-22, 2013.

Translating complex genomic data into widely used clinical tests has been much slower than anticipated. FDA-approved diagnostic tests have only been approved to predict response to therapy for nine oncology drugs a decade after the completion of the human genome sequence. All of these are simple tests that measure the status (mutation, translocation, over expression etc.) of the drug target or pathway.

Benefits of Dr. Dracopli's talk include:

• Overview of FDA approved companion diagnostics for oncology
• Application of biomarkers in drug development
• Translating complex genomic data into informative clinical tests
• Role of companion diagnostics in development of new drugs in oncology
• Novel strategies for the co-development of drugs and diagnostics

Dr. Nicholas Dracopoli is Vice President/Head of Oncology Biomarkers at Janssen R&D, LLC of Johnson & Johnson. In this role he is responsible for biomarker discovery, development and application for oncology products. Previously, he was Vice President of Clinical Discovery Technologies at Bristol-Myers Squibb, and prior to that spent five years in the biotechnology industry at Sequana Therapeutics. Dr Dracopoli obtained his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of London, and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Subsequently, he served as an Assistant Director at the Whitehead/MIT Genome Center and as a Section Chief at the National Center for Human Genome Research at the NIH before moving to the biotechnology industry. Dr Dracopoli has authored more than 70 scientific publications, and has extensive experience in the fields of genomics, molecular biology and cancer research.

The Biomarker Summit 2013 provides a unique opportunity to gain the latest biomarker developments in three major therapeutic areas, formally organized in the following tracks:

6th Oncology Biomarkers
2nd Neurological Biomarkers
2nd Inflammatory & Immunological Biomarkers

The summit will discuss a wide range of issues such as biomarker identification and validation strategies, patient stratification, enabling omics technologies, bioinformatics and systems biology techniques, regulatory and reimbursement trends and the development of companion diagnostics. These areas will be addressed in an intimate and highly interactive environment with perspectives from industry, academia and the public sector.

For more information, please visit http://www.gtcbio.com/biomarkersummit

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