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Purpose
The chief objective of this interactive event is to facilitate thoughtful exchanges between the key Indian stakeholders and those participating from the USA. The Institute for Strategic Biotechnology, Health &
Training (ISBHT) has taken the lead in organizing the first event of this scale on this important topic in Mumbai, India. Many international leaders from academia, industry and
technology will be in participation. The goals:
• Showcase new merging technologies
• Highlight recent success stories
• Explore the utility of translational biomarkers in the healthcare settings
• Deliberate opportunities for potential partnerships and collaborations with technology providers and organizations
• Discuss potential licensing opportunities in novel biomarkers technologies
• Assess the potential for Indian bio-repositories and their standards
• Explore new business opportunities and ventures, and
• Develop ideas for follow up actions
Preamble
Post genomics, many new technologies such as proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics are empowering researchers to detect
and monitor therapeutic interventions more readily than ever before. Biomarkers,
which can now be measured by high-throughput approaches, represent the
repertoire of biochemical moieties present in cells, tissues and body fluids.
These molecules are the final products of interactions between gene expression,
protein expression and the cellular environment. Biomarkers thus represent a
state of physiology or pathology. Rapid advances in this field have been helpful
to realize the development and delivery of personalized approaches to disease
prevention, diagnosis and treatment much sooner than one had anticipated.
Translational biomarkers are those measured in body fluids and/or tissues, and
that are ready to be applied to the population to evaluate the state of
physiological or pathological (disease) conditions. The application of
biomarkers to the prediction, diagnosis and treatment of diseases is
revolutionizing the development of disease-specific treatment strategies within
the healthcare setting. 
Many disease-specific biomarkers are ready for their immediate use under a
variety of healthcare settings. These could involve patient stratification,
diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring (prognostic), and therapeutics (drugs)
development based on their clinical responsiveness in individuals with different
genetic/environmental susceptibilities. These single (or panels) of disease-specific biomarkers have cleared the way to use a multi-faceted
approach to total patient care and to offer the ability to improve the existing
approaches or develop new predictive, diagnostic and therapeutic methods. Personalized medicine offers patients and clinicians several advantages such as:
a) Informed medical decisions
b) Better-targeted therapies
c) Reduction in potential side effects
d) Prevent conditions using predictive models
e) Early disease intervention using predictive molecular and imaging technologies
f) Targeted drugs based on genetic susceptibility
g) Effective healthcare delivery with advanced technologies
h) Reduction in healthcare costs
Companion Biomarkers, when successfully applied to the population, offer a number of advantages to:
a) Identifying genetic predisposition to diseases (Risk Assessment)
b) Developing intervention strategies to prevent behavioral/lifestyle diseases (Prevention)
c) Detecting diseases early using molecular markers (Early Detection)
d) Diagnosing diseases accurately and develop individualized treatment strategies (Diagnosis)
e) Improving outcomes through targeted treatments and reduced side effects (Treatment)
f) Monitoring treatment responses and disease progression (Management)
With the increasing use of disease-specific biomarkers in healthcare settings, new regulatory requirements are evolving to clear approval processes for their use. The growth in healthcare-driven biomarkers has also resulted in many new small enterprises. This has led to the creation of repositories and standards for their use in the biomarkers validation. Further, the need for additional bio-repositories is increasing. India is well positioned to respond to this need, by populating new repositories and helping drive advances in the field of biomarkers-based healthcare.
Sponsors
