As part of our commitment to support and train the next generation of scientific leaders, Keystone Symposia hosts Career Roundtables at in-person events and through our virtual platform. These workshops create a forum for field leaders to provide their unique perspectives on career development, professional pitfalls and the breadth of scientific opportunities available to support trainee scientists.

In this Career Roundtable ePanel we will explore career opportunities available at the National Institutes of Health. Representatives from diverse positions will share their experiences and insights, from those who run their own laboratories at the NIH, to those in directorship positions or communications roles.

Join us for this FREE ePanel event to discover what it is like to work at the NIH, and find out:

• How does working for the government differ from working in academia or industry?
• What is attractive about working for the government, and what is challenging?
• What qualities or interests might be suited for government jobs?
• How might a student know they would be a good fit for the NIH?
• What is the NIH looking for when hiring?

Don’t miss your chance to ask our panelists your questions during the live Q&A! Register now to reserve your spot.

Nanoparticles are emerging as a powerful mode of delivery for drugs, vaccines and even gene therapy, enabling the delivery of a wide variety of therapeutic agents beyond small molecules. With recent advances in nanoparticle technologies and design, scientists are now able to generate, load and target lipid nanoparticles systems for delivery of macromolecular drugs including siRNA, mRNA and DNA, as well as multicomponent gene editing complexes, essentially opening the door to new therapeutic modalities deploying nucleic acids to treat disease. These fundamental breakthroughs have led to novel vaccines for COVID-19, cancer drug treatments, and gene therapy advances.

This free ePanel event will showcase the latest developments in nanoparticle technologies and translational utility. Panelists will discuss past challenges and current solutions, focusing specifically on the development of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine as a success story. We will address questions of clinical implementation, from manufacturing to safety, immunogenicity and more, comprehensively examining the trajectory from bench to bedside from basic science and biotechnology industry perspectives. Finally, we will explore remaining hurdles, future opportunities and new horizons in nanoparticle technology development and applications, with the potential to transform vaccinology, cancer immunotherapy, gene therapy and more.

The ePanel will feature pioneering work by Dr. Pieter Cullis, winner of the VinFuture Grand Prize, which honors exceptional minds whose breakthrough scientific research, and technological innovations have enormous potential to create meaningful change at scale.

“Almost every disease, from cancer to Alzheimer’s, could be tackled by mRNA technology enabled by lipid nanoparticles.” – Prof. Cullis

Climate change is having widespread impacts on human health and has been called “the greatest health threat of the 21st century.” In this inaugural event of the Keystone Symposia and the Global Consortium for Climate Health and Education ePanel Series Climate Change and Human Health: Impending Crisis and Vulnerable Populations, we will provide a broad overview of current knowledge regarding the existential problem of climate change and human health. Through case examples, we will explore how climate related exposures – such as extreme heat, wildfires, drought and extreme weather events – exact disproportionate health tolls on vulnerable populations worldwide. Experts will discuss and debate how and why climate justice and equity must be at the core of our efforts to address the climate crisis.

Specifically, we will cover climate health in the context of the following high-risk populations:

• African nations
• Indigenous populations
• People with disabilities
• Women
• Mothers and children

Bringing together a panel of experts across sectors and specialties, the discussion will tackle these societal health questions from many angles. We will gain perspectives from clinicians, researchers, journal editors, educators, non-profit foundation leaders and public health policy experts to holistically assess these challenges and identify ways the scientific community can get involved and take action against these impacts and inequities. From personal efforts to institutional initiatives, we aim to inspire audiences to become embassadors within their own communities for climate health research, education and sustainability.

This ePanel will celebrate the inaugural winners of the Michelson Philanthropies & Science Prize for Immunology, an international prize that focuses on transformative research in human immunology, with trans-disease applications to accelerate vaccine and immunotherapeutic discovery. The prize is intended to encourage and support young investigators from a wide range of disciplines and will be awarded annually based on work done in the past three years.

This year’s recipients are:

• Grand prize winner Paul Bastard, MD, PhD, (Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases, Institut Imagine, INSERM & University of Paris and The Rockefeller University, New York)
  Why do people die from COVID-19?: Autoantibodies neutralizing type I interferons increase with age.
• Finalist Scott B. Biering, PhD, (Division of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley)
  One antibody to treat them all: Conserved flavivirus protein holds potential as target for versatile vaccines and therapies.
• Finalist Lisa Wagar, PhD, (Institute for Immunology, University of California, Irvine)
  Small centers of defense: Deciphering immune responses to viruses and vaccines using human tonsil organoids.

Following welcome remarks by Dr. Gary Michelson, Michelson Philanthropies founder and co-chair, Bill Moran, Publisher of AAAS/Science, United States Senator Alex Padilla of California, and Seth Scanlon, Editor of AAAS/Science, the recipients will present their award winning research and participate in a Q&A with the audience.

Applications for the prize opens May 1. For more information, visit https://www.michelsonmedicalresearch.org/projects/michelson-philanthropies-and-science-prize-for-immunology and https://www.science.org/content/page/michelson-philanthropies-and-science-prize-immunology

A panel of scientists and policy experts from academia, industry, government, and non-profit organizations discuss key questions of intellectual property (IP) control over the genome editing of agricultural crop species with CRISPR. What are the stakes of getting the balance between control and access right? What are the controversies and unknowns, especially at the intersections of IP and other domains of innovation in an essential industry like agriculture? How is the IP landscape affecting innovation in agriculture? How does it influence R&D priorities? Who ends up controlling the trajectory of applications of genome editing? Where are the key conversations we need to be having regarding interrelationship between IP, in a narrow legal sense, and broader societal concerns over control and access of genome editing tools?

Despite significant advances in drug development tools, technologies and strategies in recent years, these advances have not translated into successful treatments for brain diseases. While obstacles like the blood-brain barrier do pose additional challenges in this field, more can, and needs to be done to drive progress towards thus far elusive therapeutic successes.

We desperately need new approaches to innovate the landscape of drug discovery in brain therapeutics, and interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has yielded some critical insights. In the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided us a new window into how to think and work differently to smash old timelines for drug discovery.

Through this virtual event, we invite the global drug discovery community in brain therapeutics to come together to brainstorm about lessons learned from these pandemic times, and how to apply these new strategies to catalyze success in our own field. In particular, we will address new models for collaboration and integration of multi-stakeholder partnerships to re-envision a more efficient and effective ecosystem of drug discovery for CNS therapeutics.

Key Topics:

• How to incentivize inclusive, efficient, collaborations among all actors, including academia, government institutions, for-profit companies and funders, both public (governments) and private (charities).
• How to scout the ecosystem for transformational innovation that can deliver targets linked to disease biology and associated biomarkers to improve the success rate of CNS therapeutics?
• How to take advantage of breakthrough technologies and approaches that have revolutionized therapies in non-CNS diseases?
• How to ensure that existing investments open-science platforms are leveraged effectively by academia and private sectors?
• How do we create new road-maps “driving science” through go/no go decisions on key targets for more efficient processes?
• How can we define relevant companion biomarkers/diagnostic stratification, for a clinically relevant drug discovery process?

#VKSBrainTherapy22

The ePanel event aims to address the promise, and reality, of AI in the context of health. AI is expected to be one of the most transformative technologies in history, reshaping the relationship between people and technology in almost every sector. The World Economic Forum has called artificial intelligence (AI) the ‘electricity of the fourth industrial revolution.’ But beyond the hype:

• How can AI contribute to tackling health challenges in times of a pandemic?
• How effective are AI algorithms in modeling the spread of infection and supporting disease diagnosis?
• How can AI help accelerate urgent drug discovery and development?
• How can we build trustworthiness in AI for health?

Bringing together AI luminaries with diverse perspectives on AI in medicine and public health, we will explore these questions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, in an effort to drive AI applications towards tangible impacts on global public health. The event will conclude with a live audience Q/A, where you can ask these field leaders your burning questions and shape the discussion around new frontiers at the intersection of AI and medicine.