Lao Saal
CEO at SAGA Diagnostics
Dr. Saal graduated from Columbia University, New York, with MD and PhD degrees, and has performed cancer research at the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is Associate Professor, Division of Oncology, Lund University, and Heads the Translational Oncogenomics Unit.
In 2016 he co-founded SAGA Diagnostics AB, a cancer genomics company providing products and services to pharma, academia, and healthcare that enable ultrasensitive quantification of tumor DNA in cancer liquid biopsies and tissues (http://sagadiagnostics.com).

Title: Applications of ultrasensitive circulating tumor DNA measurements to 0.001% VAF in cancer liquid biopsies using SAGAsafe (IBSAFE) digital chemistry
- Increasingly, rare sequence variants are important to identify and quantify in research and healthcare, and in particular within cancer research and oncology such as in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA).
- In sequence variant quantification, polymerase errors inevitably introduce false-positive signals in qPCR, dPCR, and NGS workflows which hinders performance and negatively impacts their lower limits of detection (LoD).
- SAGAsafe is an improved dPCR-compatible method for highly sensitive and specific detection of SNVs that is ultrasensitive to a lower LoD of 0.001% variant allele frequency (VAF). Example applications in lung cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, and acute myeloid leukemia will be presented.