Presenting at the CVC HCC Biomarker Symposium at UT Southwestern, Dallas

On May 16, I presented at the CVC HCC Biomarker Symposium at UT Southwestern's campus in Dallas, a day-long gathering that brought together industry and academia to share the latest research on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) screening and surveillance.

I presented "Sequence Once, Detect Many: A Mixture-of-Experts Approach to Epigenomic HCC Surveillance" in the Industry and Biomarkers session, alongside teams from Fujifilm, Abbott, Exact Sciences, Universal Diagnostics, Curve Biosciences, Natera, and Roche/Genentech. It was a good chance to see, side by side, how different companies are approaching the same clinical problem — from AFP-L3/DCP panels to ctDNA monitoring to whole-body biology.

A few takeaways from the day:

1. Screening landscape. UT Southwestern, Baylor College of Medicine, University of Michigan, and NCI's Early Detection Research Network opened with where HCC screening stands today: the limitations of ultrasound, the case for AMRI and blood-based biomarkers, how biomarker validation phases map onto large cross-sectional studies, and open questions like whether F3 fibrosis patients should be included in surveillance at all.

2. Industry is converging on blood-based surveillance, but from different angles. Fujifilm and Abbott are refining biomarker panels and risk-prediction algorithms; Exact Sciences shared an update on Oncoguard Liver following the ALTUS study; Natera and Curve Biosciences are pushing ctDNA and whole-body biology approaches. Our own talk focused on getting more signal out of a single sequencing run through a mixture-of-experts architecture, rather than adding more assays.

3. Regulatory clarity is starting to take shape. A walkthrough of the MolDX "Two-Step" pathway and a direct look at the FDA approval process were genuinely useful for a small team trying to plan a realistic path to reimbursement.

4. Academic research is still finding new signal. UT Southwestern, UCLA, NYU, MUSC, Cedars-Sinai, and UCSF presented on everything from small RNA panels and extracellular vesicle assays to cfDNA methylome analysis, glycoproteomic biomarkers, and MRD and post-transplant prognostication, a reminder of how much biology is still being mined for early detection signal.

Beyond the talks, the real value was the room itself: getting to meet key opinion leaders in HCC directly, and compare notes with peers building in the same space at Exact Sciences and Natera. Grateful to the CVC and UT Southwestern for putting together a day where industry and academia were genuinely in the same conversation.