The sixth annual IEEE EMB (Engineering in Medicine and Biology) strategic conference was held in Maryland from November 20th through November 22nd of this year. The conference focused on Health Innovations, specifically POCT (Point Of Care Technologies), and provided a “strategic forum in which clinicians, industry experts, innovation experts, researchers and students will examine how to define unmet clinical needs and successfully travel along the innovation cycle towards commercialization and patient impact.” The main goal of this conference was for stakeholders to explore these technologies and collaborate to improve healthcare at an affordable cost. Dr. Ellington from the University of Texas was in attendance and gave a talk on “Synthetic Biology/Gene Editing’s Role in Diagnostics”. Dr. Ellington provided insights into the difficult task of reducing complex technologies to the bedside and beyond, where simplicity is more important than scientific novelty. In particular, he discussed how simple isothermal amplification and simple oligonucleotides probes (so-called LAMP-OSD) may be vastly superior to CRISPR-based methods for diagnostics.
