I am currently writing from 30,000 feet as I make my annual pilgrimage to the AGBT conference in Marco Island, FL. I am fortunate in that I have been a regular attendee of this conference and have lived with it through its growth from tiny little rival conference (in the eyes of the very large GSAC meetings of the day) to a conference that now sold out within three minutes of opening their registration! Much has happened during that time, the announcement of the “completion” of the draft of the Human genome, the corresponding lull that followed and then the renewed excitement that 454 brought with the first next-gen sequencer.

This year, I find myself more excited than ever. Not because we get to hear publicly about the Oxford Nanopore instrument, or if Pacific Biosciences will still be shooting off fireworks over the ocean, but because there are several talks scheduled that plan to illustrate how these new technologies are making an impact in the care and treatment of patients. While learning about the incredible research and development that goes into making an Illumina HiSeq or an Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine is fascinating, it was always with the slant of how will this affect patient care?

Well, from a look at the speaker schedule (AGENDA) it looks like we are going to learn quite a bit. Some particular talks I look forward to are those by Joe Boland on exome sequencing with the Personal Genome Machine, Oxford Nanopore’s discussion of their progress and Sam Levy’s talk on interrogating tumor-normal pairs with Illumina and Ion Torrent sequencing. (Full disclosure, Dr. Levy worked with EdgeBio to generate the Ion Torrent data so I am a bit biased here – but still really excited to hear his talk!)

AGBT also distinguishes itself through the atmosphere that is felt throughout the conference. Rita Dunton from G Corp is the Organizer, who has heard from me much unsolicited and solicited advice on how to improve the conference over the years. While we have certainly disagreed on certain things, I have to say that Rita puts on the best conference I have attended in all my years in this industry. She will tell you that it was only possible due to her amazing staff and the sponsors and attendees but I say that it is Rita who has really made this a stand-out event. Rita, keep up the great work!

This week I am going to try and tweet from certain talks, provided it is allowed, not just a regurgitation of what is being said, but what I think could be important take home points or what it could mean in the future. I am not a prolific tweeter by any means so the tweets could range from inane to undecipherable to just plain awful. My goal is for one tweet that makes people think and look for more information about a topic. Modest but realistic.

So stay tuned. And if you are reading this and attending the conference, check out our Twitter account and see if you can find Adam at #WhereisAB through his series of tweets and Touts for some fun from EdgeBio.

Cheers,

Dean