Heather Wietzel

Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Proassurance

Search every verified Heather Wietzel interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Heather Wetzel, then a representative of Personalis, presented a web seminar in September 2016 on the company's ACE CancerPlus test, a DNA and RNA sequencing test for solid tumors. During the presentation, Wetzel described the test as reporting on 181 clinically relevant genes, powered by a larger panel of over 1,300 genes, and capable of detecting base substitutions, insertions, deletions, copy number alterations, and gene fusions. She stated that early testing through the Department of Veterans Affairs, primarily in non-small cell lung cancer patients, showed that the majority of patients had variants associated with FDA-approved therapies. Wetzel discussed challenges in clinical next-generation sequencing, including poorly focused gene panels, coverage gaps, and difficulties with FFPE tissue samples. She said that Personalis had developed in-house technologies to successfully sequence approximately 90% of FFPE samples received. She noted that the test's validation involved nearly 40 tumor cell lines and achieved over 99% sensitivity for base substitutions at a 5% allele fraction. Wetzel added that the test was available only in North America, ordered by physicians, with a turnaround time of approximately three weeks and pricing competitive with similar tests.