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Program notes — AGBT Precision Health 2026

Research notes underpinning the AGBT-PM 2026 vault. Confirmed dates / venue, organizing committee, speaker lineup, source aggregators, and pre-meeting dead ends.

Status: Pre-meeting (T-4 months as of May 11, 2026). This page captures what is publicly known now, and flags what is missing for the post-meeting build pass.

Confirmed dates / venue

  • Dates: September 14–16, 2026
  • Venue: San Diego, CA (specific hotel TBD on the public landing page; the 2025 meeting was at Loews Coronado Bay Resort, and 2023–2025 all ran in greater San Diego — Loews Coronado Bay remains the working assumption)
  • Source: agbtprecisionhealth.org and agbt.org Precision Health page (fetched May 2026)

History / venue context

  • Inaugural meeting: September 2016, Scottsdale, AZ — launched by Michael Talkowski, Eric Green, and colleagues to address the gap between sequencing-technology meetings (the main AGBT GM) and clinical-implementation venues.
  • Venue pattern: Has rotated between Scottsdale and San Diego in past years; 2024 and 2025 were both San Diego, and 2026 continues the San Diego run.
  • Calendar pattern: Consistently early-to-mid September, 3 days.

Organizing committee (per agbtprecisionhealth.org, partial)

Founding / current co-chairs (per Inside Precision Medicine 10-year retrospective):

  • Eric Green, MD, PhD — NHGRI Director
  • Michael Talkowski, PhD — MGH / Broad Institute (founding co-chair)
  • Wendy Chung, MD, PhD — Boston Children's Hospital, Department of Pediatrics chair

Additional 2026 committee members surfaced on the official landing page:

  • Gail Jarvik — University of Washington
  • Stephen Montgomery — Stanford
  • Heidi Rehm — Harvard / Broad Institute

Total committee size per landing page: 10 members (4 not enumerated on the public page as of May 2026).

Confirmed speakers (15, per agbtprecisionhealth.org)

Speaker Affiliation Likely topic area
Monica Wojcik Boston Children's Hospital Newborn / rapid pediatric WGS
Gonçalo Abecasis Regeneron Genetics Center Population exome / WGS at scale
Richard Lifton Rockefeller / HHMI Mendelian disease genomics
Alexis Battle Johns Hopkins DL / functional genomics
Daniel Geschwind UCLA Neuropsychiatric genomics
Sara Mostafavi UW / Allen Institute Genomic foundation models
Kiran Musunuru Penn In-vivo gene-editing therapeutics
Marylyn Ritchie MUSC eMERGE / clinical-decision support
Jenny Taylor Oxford UK Genomic Medicine Service
Fyodor Urnov IGI Berkeley Custom CRISPR therapeutic platform
Theodore Drivas Penn Rare-disease diagnostics
Andrew Stergachis UW Long-read clinical genomics (Fiber-seq)
Nadav Ahituv UCSF Regulatory-variant interpretation / MPRA
Niall Lennon Broad Clinical-sequencing platform / throughput
Diana Bianchi NIH / NICHD Prenatal genomics

Additional speakers not yet announced on the public landing page (35+ sessions advertised; 15 named so far).

Program shape (historical, expected to carry into 2026)

Per Inside Precision Medicine retrospective:

  • Opening pre-conference workshops — hands-on skill-building (variant interpretation, AI for clinical genomics, regulatory pathway, returning results).
  • Plenary sessions — across rare disease, AI, therapeutics, population genomics, implementation.
  • The Great Debate — recurring tradition; two sides argue an unresolved precision-medicine question.
  • Concurrent abstract-selected oral sessions — Cancer / Computational / Implementation / Discovery tracks (track names approximate).
  • Storytelling / patient-family sessions — distinctive AGBT-PM feature.
  • Trainee mentoring track.
  • Poster sessions — abstracts visible to attendees only.

Anticipated tracks and themes (forecast — revisit when full agenda lands)

Based on 2025 program and confirmed 2026 speaker affiliations:

  1. Rare-disease genomic diagnostics — GREGoR Consortium read-outs; diagnostic-odyssey case series; rapid-WGS in NICU; long-read clinical sequencing for cryptic variation.
  2. AI in clinical genomics — emphasis (per 2025 framing) on "post-hype, validated patient outcomes": variant calling, splice-AI–style prediction, foundation-model embeddings for phenotype matching, automated medical-record interpretation.
  3. Precision therapeutics & n=1 in-vivo editing — patient-specific gene-editing case reports (CRISPR / base / prime); regulatory pathway for ultra-rare; ethics and access.
  4. Population genomics / biobank read-outs — Regeneron GHS exome+, UK Biobank WGS, NIH All of Us, FinnGen, Genomics England 100K → NHS GMS transition.
  5. Clinical sequencing implementation — eMERGE phase-IV; clinical-throughput at Broad; UK Genomic Medicine Service rollout; payer / reimbursement.
  6. Newborn / prenatal precision sequencing — BabySeq2, GUARDIAN, NewbornsInSC; cell-free DNA prenatal beyond aneuploidy.
  7. Liquid biopsy / MRD — Guardant, Natera, Personalis, Foundation/Tempus/Caris real-world performance reports (typically vendor-track, not a named-speaker session).
  8. Pharmacogenomics implementation — CPIC guideline rollout; preemptive PGx at EHR scale.
  9. Regulatory-variant interpretation — MPRA at scale (Ahituv), splicing prediction, non-coding variant prioritization.

Themes are forecast, not confirmed. Revisit when 2026 agenda publishes (typically August, pre-meeting).

Sponsors (TBD — not yet published for 2026)

Expected from 2024–2025 patterns:

  • Sequencing platforms: Illumina, Roche, Element Biosciences, PacBio, Oxford Nanopore, Ultima, Complete Genomics
  • Clinical NGS / liquid-biopsy: Guardant Health, Natera, Personalis, Foundation Medicine, Tempus, Caris Life Sciences, Twist Bioscience, IDT
  • Variant interpretation / AI: Fabric Genomics, Genomenon, MOON / Diploid, DNAnexus, Velsera (ex-Seven Bridges)
  • Other: newborn-screening labs, CRO partners, biobank infrastructure

To be confirmed against the 2026 sponsor page once published.

Source aggregators

Pages in adjacent vaults that will likely interlink with AGBT-PM 2026 read-outs:

  • AGBT 2026 platform launches — most AGBT-PM clinical programs run on AGBT-GM-launched platforms. Cross-link each per-program dossier upstream.
  • ASCO 2026 — MRD / liquid-biopsy trial read-outs (ASCO is end-May / early-June; ESMO is October; AGBT-PM is the September interleave).
  • ESMO 2026 — same population of liquid-biopsy vendors with European trial sites.
  • SITC 2026 — immuno-oncology biomarker overlap (MRD-guided IO continuation, ctDNA-defined responder cohorts).
  • ASHG 2026 — academic human-genetics venue (Oct 20–24, 2026); same investigator population, different framing.
  • AACR 2026 posters — Guardant/Natera/Personalis liquid-biopsy posters from April 2026 likely re-presented in September.

Pre-meeting dead ends / open items

  • Full agenda not yet published. As of May 2026 the public landing page advertises 35+ sessions with 15 confirmed speakers. The remaining 20+ slots, session titles, plenary structure, and Great Debate topic are not yet posted.
  • Registration not yet open. Page says "Opening soon"; abstract submission deadline not yet published. (Historical pattern: abstracts close ~6 weeks pre-meeting; expect late July / early August deadline.)
  • Specific venue hotel not confirmed on the public page — working assumption is Loews Coronado Bay Resort (carried over from 2025), to be verified.
  • 2025 detailed recap is podcast / video only. Inside Precision Medicine's 2025 agenda preview and the DNA Today podcast are the highest-fidelity public records of the 2025 program; there is no equivalent of GenomeWeb's AGBT-GM coverage for the PM meeting in 2025.
  • C&EN / GEN / Bio-IT World do not consistently cover AGBT-PM (they prioritize the General Meeting). Expect post-2026 coverage to lean on Inside Precision Medicine, DNA Today, GenomeWeb's clinical-genomics beat, and direct vendor press from Guardant/Natera/Personalis/Foundation/Tempus.
  • Closed abstract policy. Same as main AGBT — concurrent-session abstracts are not publicly indexed. Post-meeting attribution to specific speakers requires that the speaker also blog, tweet, or be quoted by trade press.
  • Sponsor list not yet published for 2026 — see the "expected" list above; confirm against the official sponsor page once posted.

TODO

  • [ ] Re-fetch agbtprecisionhealth.org in August 2026 when full agenda publishes; populate plenary lineup and Great Debate topic.
  • [ ] Re-fetch sponsor list when published; confirm vendor track and workshop slate.
  • [ ] Confirm venue hotel (working assumption: Loews Coronado Bay).
  • [ ] Pull abstract submission deadline once posted; flag here.
  • [ ] Build per-program dossiers for each of the 15 confirmed speakers from their public program output (GREGoR, BabySeq, Regeneron GHS, eMERGE, etc.) — see trials/index.md for slot list.
  • [ ] Cross-reference confirmed speakers' AGBT-PM 2026 talks against their AACR 2026 posters (already in the vault), ASCO 2026 read-outs (May–June), and ASHG 2026 talks (October — same investigator population).
  • [ ] Watch DNA Today Podcast for a 2026 recap episode (historical cadence: ~1 week post-meeting).
  • [ ] Once meeting concludes, harvest Twitter / Bluesky #AGBTPH26 for real-time quote / photo capture (not archived after ~weeks).