ADLM 2025 Plenaries to Cover the Latest in Lab Medicine

ADLM Clinical Lab Expo is a premier global lab medicine exposition that offers exclusive access to the latest advancements, expert insights, and collaborative opportunities. Each year, global leaders spanning chemistry, molecular diagnostics, spectrometry, translational medicine, laboratory management, and more come together at ADLM to discuss cutting-edge science and technology. As the place to learn about the breakthrough innovations shaping the future of clinical testing and patient care, ADLM’s Clinical Lab Expo gives attendees the opportunity to browse more than 800 exhibitors across over 200 product categories for solutions to their lab-related needs.

ADLM 2025 offers an engaging, multi-format program designed to inspire, educate, and connect professionals across all areas of laboratory medicine. This program includes Plenaries that will address timely topics applicable to all laboratorians and span the breadth of research and medicine. Each day, Sunday–Thursday, the conference begins with a thought-provoking Plenary delivered as a keynote lecture by a world-renowned expert. The opening plenary session on Sunday, July 27, will be delivered by Heidi L. Rehm, Chief Genomics Officer at Massachusetts General Hospital. Supporting genomics in research and medicine requires infrastructure, including standards, knowledge bases, and global data sharing, as well as a rich interface between research and clinical care as new discoveries are made. This plenary session, titled “Global strategies to advance genomic medicine”, will present strategies to identify novel causes of rare disease, including the application of new technologies and analysis methods as well as building innovative approaches to global data sharing and novel approaches to support genetics and genomics in medical practice.

The second plenary session on Monday, July 28, titled “Artificial intelligence in real world clinical settings” will be delivered by Judy Wawira Gichoya, associate professor at Emory University in Interventional Radiology and Informatics. Despite over 950 FDA-approved algorithms, 100 of which were in 2024, there remains limited deployment of algorithms in real-world settings. Advancements in technology are increasingly enabling the development of more frontier models that can do multiple tasks and theoretically should generalize to wider clinical settings. However, despite this enthusiasm, there continues to be limited value of AI, with minimal benefit of AI on productivity and efficiency for radiologists; yet there continues to be big optimism on the promise of AI to reduce “pajama time” and clinician burnout. Additionally, some algorithms deployed in real-world settings have been retracted, as is the case with the Epic sepsis model. This plenary session will review lessons of real-world evaluation of algorithmic models used for patient care, focusing on new challenges including shortcuts, limits of generalizability, and automation bias.

On Tuesday, July 29, Timothy Caulfield, Professor of Health Law and Science Policy at University of Alberta will deliver a plenary session titled “Infodemic! Is misinformation killing us?” Popular culture is filled with health myths, science hype, and pseudoscientific noise. Indeed, the spread of conspiracy theories and harmful health misinformation is a defining characteristic of our time. This shapes our perceptions about – and policies surrounding – health, wellbeing, and biomedical research issues. In this provocative plenary session, Professor Caulfield will look at some of the most pernicious falsehoods and explore the cultural forces driving the rise and spread of misinformation and twisted science, including celebrity culture, fearmongering, social media, science hype, and our cognitive biases. In addition, he will provide suggestions regarding concrete steps that can (and should) be taken by both individuals and organizations to both take a more critical approach to these topics and to fight the spread of misinformation.

On Wednesday, July 30, Jack Gilbert, a Professor in Pediatrics and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, will deliver a plenary session titled “Precision microbiome medicine: Identifying diagnostics and treatments”. The human microbiome is a high-dimensional and dynamic part of our physiology that plays a key role in managing health and individualized responses to diet and medicine. The immune system controls our interaction with the microbial world, and the microbial communities in our bodies are central to modulating the immune response. Changes in the human microbiome and their metabolism have a substantial influence on atopy, neurological disorders, metabolic disorders, and a range of complex conditions and disease states. Diet is incredibly important in shaping human health and the microbiome, altering both composition and metabolic activity, resulting in changes in immune, endocrine, and neurological systems. Microbiome-Wide Association Studies (MWAS) combined with novel quantitative multi-omic approaches are enabling us to use AI techniques to determine personalized responses to nutrition that drive disease states and treatment efficacy. Through these innovations, we are finally realizing the paradigm of precision medicine for facilitating patient care.

The last plenary session on Thursday, July 31, titled “The urgent threat of plastics to human health, and what we can do about it” will be delivered by Leonardo Trasande, an internationally renowned leader in environmental health. Since 1950, there appear to be only three deviations from an ongoing exponential growth in plastic production: the oil crisis of the 1970s, the financial crisis of 2008, and the COVID-19 pandemic. A further 30% increase is projected from 2025 to 2050. Much of the public concern about the impact of plastics has been focused on visible or microscopic plastic, but the gravest concerns about human health impacts of plastics relate to the release of monomers and additives that are widely detected in the general population, especially in communities located near production facilities. Exposures are amenable to reduction through behavioral and regulatory interventions. Increasing awareness has produced calls for clinical laboratory testing for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to guide clinical care and medical monitoring. This plenary session updates clinical laboratorians and healthcare providers about the science, which has largely emerged since many practitioners completed training but at the same requires a need for a paradigm shift in laboratory medicine and clinical care across the life course.