Cofactor Genomics is headed to AACR in just a few days! But it won’t be our first rodeo this conference season. At the Molecular Medicine Tri Conference in February, our recently launched product, Pinnacle, was just one of many highlights for Cofactor:

Presenting Pinnacle…
Jon Armstrong, Cofactor’s CSO, overcame the sound of jack-hammers in the construction zone outside the Moscone Center to drop a few hammers of his own during his talk in the Molecular Diagnostics track. He presented Pinnacle, our new clinical cancer diagnostic. It combines RNA expression coupled with software, to determine the molecular fingerprint of any formalin-fixed (FFPE) solid tumor sample. After the talk, several researchers approached him with questions – sample quality and quantity requirements chief among them!

Earlier in the week, our medical director, Dr. Eric Duncavage led a short course where he got down to the nuts and bolts of designing a clinical grade NGS assay. Have you seen his recent publication, Standards and Guidelines for the Interpretation and Reporting of Sequence Variants in Cancer?

Orange you glad it’s me?
Also in attendance was our team of Project Scientists, including yours truly, bearing our signature orange jackets (whose “bright” idea was that… it was “brilliant”). I met with a new contact at the conference, someone who I had previously only known through email and telephone. As we approached each other, he greeted me with “oh, it’s you”, acknowledging that my jacket had caught his attention among the many conference goers.

The Paragon is in sight!
Immuno-oncology, or “cancer immunology” as one of our well-researched contacts referred to it, was a hot topic among the clinicians and researchers in attendance. Profiling the tumor-microenvironment and determining the level of mutational burden both provide insights into how to enable the immune system to better target the tumor. With Paragon, we’ve moved the needle on profiling, creating RNA-seq based signatures for 24 immune cell types, helping you determine who has shown up to the fight!

Interested to learn more? Dr. Ryan Bloom, Cofactor’s Director of Biomarker Development, will be presenting a poster on this topic at AACR: Cofactor Paragon: a novel tool to analyze the tumor microenvironment using RNAseq.

And, the Cofactor Team will be at Booth #1962; stop by and say hello!