Coffee Chat: the role of the microbiome in cancer diagnostics

• What is the circulating microbiome and why is it so promising for early cancer detection?
• Research into profiling fungal communities in several cancer types
• How microbiome-driven biopsies compare to traditional ctDNA liquid biopsies
• Micronoma’s current research pipeline, including opportunities to use this platform beyond early-stage cancer detection

We thank our experts for their time and thoughtful contributions and hope that, through these open discussions, we can progress the field of oncology together.

Jade Parker – Host
Senior Editor
Oncology Central (London, UK)

Jade attended the Royal Veterinary College (UK) where she obtained her Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Veterinary Science. Since graduating, she has worked in the scientific publishing industry for over 6 years. Jade started her career as a Commissioning Editor for several medical journals (Future Oncology, Pain Management and Neurodegenerative Disease Management) and then moved into the digital team whereby she has progressed to become the Senior Editor for Oncology Central. In her current role, Jade oversees all the digital communications for Oncology Central.

Sandrine Miller-Montgomery
CEO, Co-founder, and President
Micronoma (CA, USA)

Sandrine brings a wealth of experience to Micronoma, having worked at large biotech and multinational companies in the life science industry, as well as start-ups. She has assumed different responsibilities from R&D director to leading sales and marketing organizations and excels at preparing companies for successful product development, operation and exits.
Before co-founding Micronoma, she was executive director of UC San Diego’s Center for Microbiome Innovation (CMI), which she co-led with renowned microbiome researcher, Dr. Rob Knight. Sandrine established a world-class team focused on expanding industry and academic collaborations in the field of microbiome research that resulted in raising more than tens of millions of dollars of financial support through key partnerships toward application of this science to AI, diet and nutrition, aging, environment, human disease understanding and more.
Sandrine has a talent for assembling efficient and successful teams around innovative products as shown by her work at Helixis, acquired by Illumina, and Mo Bio Labs acquired by QIAGEN.

Greg Sepich-Poore
Chief Analytics Officer, Co-founder
Micronoma (CA, USA)

Greg is the co-inventor of Micronoma’s patent-pending Oncobiota™ platform, which utilizes cell-free microbial nucleic acids to create better cancer diagnostics. As CAO, Greg’s expertise in microbiome science and machine learning helps guide the company’s strategy for translating copious amounts of data into accurate predictions. At only 29 years old, Micronoma is Greg’s 2nd medical technology corporation and was inspired by the unexpected Stage IV diagnosis and tragic sudden loss of his grandmother to pancreatic cancer. Greg has led and co-authored many peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell, is inventor on multiple filed patents, and was awarded an NIH fellowship funding during his Ph.D. for his research on the cancer microbiome.

Eddie Adams
Chief Scientific Officer
Micronoma (CA, USA)

An expert in nucleic acid chemistry, molecular diagnostics, product development, and R&D management, Eddie has a proven track record of driving innovation and motivating teams focused on immunology, and nucleic acid chemistry, nanotechnology and disease diagnostics. Before joining Micronoma, Eddie was vice president of R&D at Active Motif (CA, USA), leading the development of all new products and services for epigenetic analysis. Prior to that, he was director of R&D at Mo Bio Laboratories (acquired by QIAGEN), where he developed products for the extraction/isolation of DNA, RNA, and proteins from complex matrices such as microbiome samples. That work led to the filing of six patent applications covering new methods of PCR inhibitor depletion, chemistries for high throughput protein isolation, and novel approaches to nucleic acid size selection for next generation sequencing library preparation.