PROGNOSIS TEST FOR THYROID CANCER

Dr. Hernán González

Hernán González, MD, PhD. He is currently Associate Professor of Surgery in the Department of Surgical Oncology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He completed his clinical fellowship in head and neck surgery at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Maintains active clinical practice in the surgical treatment of patients with thyroid cancer, with extensive experience in the management of advanced localized cancer and recurrent thyroid cancer.

For the past 5 years he has led a research team at the Biomedical Research Consortium (BMRC), focusing on translational research in cancer biomarkers. His group has created new bioinformatics methods that allow the development of high precision, but small sized, genetic signature tests that can be adapted to widely available diagnostic platforms. The first test, soon to be commercialized and called Thyroidprint®, is a genetic expression test that very accurately (NPV 98%) rules out the presence of thyroid cancer in indeterminate thyroid nodules. This signature uses 10 genes, operates on an FDA-approved qPCR platform and will be available as a diagnostic kit in treatment centres. A promising portfolio of new diagnostic and prognosis signatures is under development, including thyroid, lung and gastric cancer, thus increasing the supply of tests for personalized medicine.
Dr. González has recently founded the biotechnology startup, GeneproDX, which is a molecular diagnostics company based in Silicon Valley and Santiago - Chile, which will market new tests for personalized medicine used for the diagnosis and prognosis of solid tumors.