This month, we’ll be attending the 2017 edition of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) annual scientific meeting and clinical lab expo, which is being held at the San Diego Convention Center, Sunday through Thursday, July 30–August 3. The exhibit hall is open Tuesday through Thursday (August 1–3), closing at 1:00 pm on the final day.
Steve Halasey, CLP.
The organizers rightly describe their event as “the premier international forum for presenting groundbreaking advances in laboratory medicine.” We encourage you to attend, to visit with our exhibiting advertisers while you’re there, and to drop by our booth (Booth no. 4) just outside one of the entrances. If you let us know you’re coming, we’ll be happy to buy you coffee at the nearby Starbucks, and to spend some time learning more about what you do.
The clinical lab expo will feature more than 750 exhibitors displaying pioneering diagnostic technologies, including the latest in mobile health, molecular diagnostics, mass spectrometry, point-of-care, and automation. The OEM section features product and service providers with a primary focus on in vitro diagnostic manufacturers, but also offering resources of interest to the creators of lab-developed tests.
The organizers have highlighted several ‘must attend’ presentations:
- A plenary session talk by CRISPR coinventor Jennifer Doudna, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, on the future of genome engineering with this revolutionary tool.
- A plenary session by Victoria J. Fraser, MD, of the Washington University School of Medicine, on antimicrobial stewardship, infection prevention, and the clinical lab’s vital role in combating the antibiotic resistance crisis.
- In one special session, the winning team of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize competition, Final Frontier Medical Devices, will present its real-life Star Trek tricorder for the first time at a US scientific conference. The mobile health device, called DxtER, weighs no more than 5 lb and is designed to enable consumers to monitor five real-time health vital signs and diagnose 34 diseases—all without the help of a clinician. Final Frontier Medical Devices team member Philip Charron will discuss the technological innovations behind DxtER and answer questions from meeting attendees.
Final Frontier Medical Devices is not the only group with an interest in miniaturizing, as evidenced by this issue’s Inside Track interview with Mehdi Javanmard, PhD, of Rutgers University. We look forward to hearing more about the technology developed by Javanmard and colleagues—perhaps in a session at a future AACC meeting.
Steve Halasey
Chief Editor, CLP
[email protected]
(626) 219-0199
