MEDICA Hosts LABMED Forum at the 2024 Trade Show

At MEDICA, the world’s leading trade fair for the healthcare business and the medical technology industry, the professional forums and their accompanying stage program at this year’s trade fair on November 11 – 14, 2024 in Düsseldorf, Germany will provide in-depth insights into various laboratory topics. For example, health IT, medical technology trends, healthcare policy, and laboratory medicine. 
 
With its informative short lectures and expert panel discussions, the MEDICA LABMED forum has become one of the main attractions of the MEDICA ancillary program in recent years. 
 
“Laboratory 4.0,” will discuss skilled labor shortage, the impetus for major disease complexes, and provide a look into the future.
 
Prof. Stefan Holdenrieder of the German Heart Center in Munich (DHM), who is the Scientific Director of the MEDICA LABMED forum, points to the trend towards massive digitalization and networking as well as big data applications and artificial intelligence (AI).
 
“We have so far mainly considered individual lab results,” Holdenrieder commented. “In the future, we will analyze more and more complex data patterns using machine learning and aggregate them as complex diagnostic scores. Lab medicine is currently evolving from a purely analytical discipline in the direction of data science. In this process, interdisciplinary collaboration between laboratory technicians and specialized data scientists, especially computer scientists and biostatisticians, is becoming increasingly important.”

Day One

On the first day of MEDICA, the LABMED forum will focus on the topics of digitalization and AI, headed by Prof. Thomas Streichert (MD), University Hospital Cologne. The morning session will be dedicated to the shortage of skilled personnel, which is the most pressing problem for laboratory medicine according to recent surveys. 
 
As Head of the Young Laboratory section of the German Society for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (DGKL), Dr. Ronald Biemann of the University of Leipzig Medical Center will report on the shortage, in some cases dramatic, of future personnel in the medical and medical-technical fields. In the panel discussion, the speakers will explore solutions to the crisis with the help of automation and digitalization.
 
In the afternoon, the focus will be on AI and big data tools that are already available or still under development. Image recognition using deep learning is already state-of-the-art for the automated analysis of leucograms, while machine learning based on large multivariate data sets that occur every day in laboratory diagnostics is still at a developmental stage. 
 
The question of how large language models can help make abstract laboratory findings more understandable and whether AI makes us smarter (or possibly less intelligent) will also be discussed.

Day Two 

On day two of the trade fair, Prof. Stefan Holdenrieder will lead a discussion on current developments in laboratory medicine for the two disease complexes that determine mortality in the Western world, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. 
 
This year, the cardiology focus will be on congenital heart defects. They can increasingly be corrected surgically in childhood and play a growing role in adult medicine due to improvements in life expectancy. Lecturers from the German Heart Centre and the Technical University of Munich will highlight the topic from a clinical perspective, and mathematician Prof. Frank Klawonn of the Helmholtz Center in Brunswick will demonstrate possibilities for modern data evaluation using machine learning.
 
The afternoon program will discuss highly sensitive blood-based cancer diagnostics. With the examination technique, known as the “liquid biopsy”, lab medicine opens up new ways in oncology to monitor tumor progression more closely than is possible with conventional tissue biopsies. This allows early detection of when a treated cancer will flare up again and require a change in treatment. 
 
New methodological approaches such as the analysis of methylation profiles for early detection of hereditary forms of cancer or single-cell analysis using microfluidics will be discussed.

Day Three 

Young Scientists’ Day of the MEDICA LABMED forum will take place on day three. The next generation of researchers will present their perspective on the future of laboratory medicine. As an introduction, university lecturer Dr Verena Haselmann (MD) of the University Medical Center Mannheim will give an overview of the most recent progress in the field and obstacles that still need to be overcome. 
 
New opportunities include, for example, wearables for the continuous recording of diagnostic parameters, while obstacles include new quality requirements and the shortage of skilled personnel. 
 
In the afternoon, the discussion will focus on personalized therapy based on individual patterns of laboratory parameters, the interdisciplinary interaction of laboratory and imaging in integrated diagnostics, and the use of artificial intelligence.

Day Four

The final day of the forum will focus on diagnostic research institutes and companies that want to open the door to new fields of application in laboratory medicine. Both sessions will be led by members of the German Diagnostics Industry Association (VDGH), Dr. Kai Prager and Dr. Peter Quick. 
 
Prager and Quick’s topic for 2024 will be research on aging from the perspectives of pathophysiology, diagnostics, and treatment. The latest findings on the genetic and epigenetic biological clock, protein misfolding, and aggregation as the basis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and the role of gut microbiota during strokes will be some of the topics discussed.
 
For the final afternoon discussion, interesting theories and practical experiences will be discussed on how the aging process can be slowed down. 
 
Prof. Emrah Düzel of the University of Magdeburg will present various anti-aging drugs, Prof. Wolfram Ruf of the University of Mainz will describe the effects of anti-inflammatory agents, Prof. Dres. Monique Breteler of DZNE, the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases, will talk about the influence of the environment on aging in the central nervous system and Prof. Claire Jacob, also of the University of Mainz, will discuss possibilities to repair lesions in the nervous system.
 
To date, about 6,000 companies have signed up as exhibitors at MEDICA 2024 and COMPAMED 2024, the concurrently held supplier trade fair. In 2023, both events recorded a total of 83,000 visitors.