A Biochemical Society Focused Meeting
Abstract submission deadline: 11 November 2009
Online abstract submission is now closed. If you wish to submit an abstract please contact the Conference Office. Late abstracts will not appear in the programme book.
Earlybird registration deadline: 18 December 2009
Registration will close 14 January 2010. No registrations will be taken after this date. Please note that a £50 late fee has now been added to the registration fees.
Proceedings (invited speakers) will be published in Biochemical Society Transactions
Oral communication slots are available at this meeting. All attendees, particularly researchers in the early stages of their career, are invited to submit a poster abstract for consideration as an oral communication.
Student Travel Grants are available for this meeting.
BJ ChemBio poster prize
The Biochemical Journal kindly sponsored a BJ Structure poster prize of £250 for the best posters displayed at the meeting. The Prize was awarded to Ole Wiskow (University of Cambridge, UK).
Scientific background:
Despite the ever increasing investment by the pharmaceutical industry into research and development, the number of new drugs that reach the market place has been decreasing annually. A major hurdle lies at the juncture between the preclinical and clinical phases due to failures in the translation of preclinical efficacy and safety data into humans. This clearly indicates that preclinical research and screening need to be modified to ensure improved relevance to human diseases. Underpinning most preclinical investigations are cellular assays, the majority of which use non-human or immortalized cells. The need to use human cells instead has long been recognized, but it is logistically impossible to obtain regular and consistent supplies of untransformed primary human cells. Recent advances in stem cell research demonstrate the ability to derive fully differentiated human cells from stem cells, raising the exciting possibility that infinite supplies of specific types of human cells may soon be available for preclinical studies. Furthermore, human cells containing disease-related genomes may also become available through nuclear transfer and induced pluripotency approaches, which would provide cells with direct relevance to specific human diseases. It is therefore increasingly recognized that the first major utility of stem cell technology is likely to be in drug discovery.
This Focused Meeting aims to bring together academics and colleagues from industry to address the state of the art in the biology of pluripotent stem cells and in particular the progress which has been made toward generating differentiated cell types from human embryonic stem cells that are of greatest potential significance in the process of drug discovery (neuronal cells, cardiomyocytes, hepatocytes). The meeting will be of great interest to scientists in both academic and industrial sectors, providing an opportunity to discuss important aspects relating to the application of stem cells.
Topics:
Stem cells
Differentiation
Drug discovery
Neural
Cardiovascular
Liver