Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Director, Broad Inst.
Biography
Viktor Adalsteinsson is the director of the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He also leads the Blood Biopsy Team, a multi-institutional collaboration to profile cancer genomes directly from blood samples. The Blood Biopsy Team includes scientists, engineers, oncologists, and computational biologists spanning numerous investigators and labs at the Broad Institute, MIT, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and others. The goal of their research is to develop impactful new diagnostic methods that stand to benefit millions of cancer patients, such as novel approaches for cancer detection and monitoring using blood biopsies.
Adalsteinsson holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from MIT (J. Christopher Love lab), where he developed novel approaches for functional and genomic profiling of single cells in cancer such as circulating tumor cells. He has been an affiliate of the Broad Institute since 2011, has run his own research lab at the Broad since 2015, and established the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics with Todd Golub in 2019. Adalsteinsson has analyzed over 15,000 blood biopsies and contributed to more than 45 publications and 12 patents with 4,000 citations in the fields of cancer genomics, cancer diagnostics, and biotechnology. Adalsteinsson was honored by MIT Technology Review in 2017 as a visionary member of its 35 Innovators Under 35 and by Clinical OMICs in 2021 as one of its Pioneers Under 40.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2027 Silicon Valley
Track Chair:
Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Rebecca Fitzgerald, University of Cambridge (Luminary)
• Mary-Claire King, University of Washington (Pioneer)
• Nickolas Papadopoulos, Johns Hopkins (Pioneer)
Featured Speakers
• Mary-Claire King, University of Washington
• Rebecca Fitzgerald, University of Cambridge
• Nickolas Papadopoulos, Johns Hopkins
• Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
• Phil Castle, NIH
• Elad Ziv, UCSF
• Ash Alizadeh, Stanford
• Hamed Amini, Hepta
• Becky Taub, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals
• Trevor Pugh, University of Toronto
• Doga Gulhan, Harvard
• Pranav Rajpurkar, Harvard
• Chris Douville, Johns Hopkins
• Sylvia Katina Plevritis, UCSF
In Precision Medicine, Almost All Diseases Are Genetically Rare
A genetics-first keynote framing risk, prevention, and actionability.
The Reckoning
What the first wave of early detection got right and wrong.
The End of One Size Fits All
Risk-stratified screening, high-risk populations, and single-cancer tests.
Treating Disease at the Earliest Stage
Where detection and therapeutic interception begin to converge.
Pre-Cancer Detection & the Liver Disease Frontier
cfDNA and clinical action across the liver-disease-to-cancer continuum.
AI Across Multimodal Signals
Fragmentomics, methylation, imaging, pathology, and integration: hype versus real science.
PMWC Hall of Impact
Previous Speakers Include
Nobel laureates, technology founders, regulators, CEOs and scientific pioneers who have taken the PMWC stage.
