Apr 30, 2026
Dr. Bill Kerr, Co-Founder and CEO of Avalon Healthcare Solutions, highlights the critical role of advanced precision diagnostics and how these tools are driving true precision medicine, where therapies are targeted to specific genetic mutations. There have been significant innovations, such as less invasive liquid biopsies and the application of AI to interpret medical images and complex lab results, which provide faster analysis and make it easier to monitor disease over time. The future of diagnostics includes more routine tests and imaging to enable earlier interventions and more effective treatments by overcoming the logistical and physical challenges of traditional tissue biopsies in cancer care.
Bill explains, "At Avalon, we believe that if you don't get the diagnosis right, the rest of healthcare is wasted, and time is wasted on getting a patient better. So our number one focus is getting the science of diagnostics deployed into the healthcare ecosystem. I think a lot of people know that there's been a lot of innovation in lab testing, as well as in advanced diagnostic imaging. And historically, it takes 17 to 20 years to get new science evenly adopted, and we want to accelerate that process. So that's really our focus. We say sciences are True North, and our goal is to get that science deployed into the healthcare system."
"I think, unfortunately, we used the phrase precision medicine too early. When it was really precision diagnostics, and I'll separate the two out. For over a decade, we've been able to measure, let's say for instance, in cancer, what mutations might be in the cancer cells, but we didn't have any new therapies to offer. So while the phrase precision medicine was used, all we did was identify the mutations, build up an understanding of the disease, but offer the same cancer therapy. Now we actually have therapies that target some of those specific mutations."
"We truly have reached the era of precision medicine. But I think getting people to understand that now it's not just measuring the mutation, it's measuring the mutation and selecting the chemotherapy based on that. That's the new reality, and that's what we're trying to get people to understand. And that's why I think undertesting still happens, because people aren't maybe aware that now there are therapeutic decisions you can make off those results."
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