Washington, D.C, August 27, 2007 – Friday, November 2, 2007, the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) and the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry (NACB) present a one-day conference Making the Case for the New Cancer Diagnostics. The conference will be held at The Hyatt Regency, St. Louis, MO and will feature speakers from prestigious cancer centers across the nation as well as from industry and government.

Personalized medicine is now a reality in cancer management, with clinicians relying on cutting-edge diagnostic tools to detect cancers earlier than ever, and then to devise the most successful, individualized therapies for patients. During this intensive conference speakers will explain the challenges and opportunities that new prostate, breast, and other cancer markers offer laboratories, clinicians, and patients. They will discuss how new gene expression assays will change the way breast cancer is managed, why the TMPRSS2 gene and other new prostate cancer markers will revolutionize diagnosis and management and how a promising panel of tumor biomarkers holds the key to detecting ovarian cancer in its earliest, most curable stage.

Conference faculty includes:

• Peter E. Barker, Ph.D, National Institute of Standards Technology National Cancer Institute Biomarker Validation Laboratory, Gaithersburg, MD
• Richard A. Bender, MD, Medical Director, Hematology/Oncology, Quest Diagnostics, San Juan Capistrano, CA
• Maria Chan, Ph.D, Associate Director Immunology, Office of In Vitro Diagnostic Devices, FDA, Rockville, MD
• Dan Cramer, MD, ScD, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School Boston, MA
• Herbert Fritsche, Ph.D, Professor & Chief of Clinical Chemistry, University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX
• Harry Rittenhouse, Ph.D., Director of the Cancer Program, Gen-Probe, Inc., San Diego, CA
• Paul Tempst, Ph.D., Professor, Molecular Biology Program, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
• Martin Fleisher, Ph.D, Chair, Dept. of Clinical Laboratories, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

AACC invites members of the press to attend the conference. For a complimentary registration, contact Peter Patterson at 1-800-892-1400 ext. 1718.  For conference details and program, check out the AACC website.

This conference is sponsored by AACC and the NACB and is supported by an educational grant from Genomic Health.

AACC is an international scientific/medical society of clinical laboratory professionals, physicians, research scientists and other individualsinvolved with clinical chemistry and other clinical laboratory science-related disciplines.