First Round of Abstract Submission Ends: Dec 30, 2024
Extended Early Bird Ends: Jun 30, 2024
Plenary Speakers
Prof. Brian Blagg
University of Notre Dame, USA
Title: Will be updated soon
Brian Blagg, Ph.D., Charles Huisking Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is Notre Dame’s first Director of the Warren Family Research Center for Drug Discovery and Development. After earning his B.A. in Chemistry and Environmental Studies at Sonoma State University, his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Utah, and completing an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Scripps Research Institute, Blagg started a medicinal chemistry lab at the University of Kansas in 2002. Now at Notre Dame, his lab continues its focus on the biochemical nature of chaperone proteins and protein folding in relation to cancer. Cancers are inherently more dependent on chaperone proteins because of their constant division, and Blagg’s team works to selectively inhibit particular chaperone proteins to effectively halt cancer growth. His lab also studies the possibility of utilizing chaperone proteins to effectively re-fold malfunctioning proteins to treat and prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Blagg was attracted to Notre Dame because of the University’s ambitious commitment to elevate its graduate programs. Since becoming a faculty member, he has found Notre Dame’s unique atmosphere—one that includes a caring and personable administration, a strong alumni base, and a passion for knowledge—to be liberating and intellectually exciting. When not at work, Dr. Blagg enjoys watching the Irish football team and spending time with his children.
Prof. Wen-Hsiung Li
Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Title: Synthetic biology and genomics tools for constructing biosynthesis pathways
Wen-Hsiung Li is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and James D. Watson Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Li received his PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. He received the 2003 Balzan Prize for Genetics and Evolution, 2009 Mendel medal, and the HUGO 2008 Chen Award. He was President of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2000. His works have been cited more than 85,000 times with an H-index of 120, according to Google Scholar.
His research interests include molecular and genomic evolution, methods for DNA sequence and genomic data analysis, computational biology and synthetic biology. In the past 15 years he has worked on biotechnology, mainly in the construction of biosynthesis pathways. For example, his lab was the first to construct an astaxanthin biosynthesis pathway in yeast and the first to express the largest cellulosome on yeast cell surface.
Prof. Richard J. Simpson
La Trobe University, Australia
Title: Clinical relevance of exosomes in cancer
Professor Simpson received his PhD in biochemistry and chemistry at Melbourne Univ., Australia in 1974. After post-doctoral studies at the NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, he returned to Australia as a Research Fellow at St. Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne. He was a Member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (1983-2011), a Research Prof. at the Univ. of Melbourne (1995 -) and Adjunct Prof. at Yonsei Univ., Korea (2001-2006). He is currently a Distinguished Professor, Laboratory Head, La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS) at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He has served as Treasurer and Secretary General of HUPO, on the HUPO Executive Committee, and a member of HUPO Council. He was inaugural President of the Asia-Oceania HUPO Executive Committee (AOHUPO). On a national level, Professor Simpson was inaugural President of the Australasian Proteomics Society (APS) (served 20 terms). In recognition of his contribution to proteomics in Australasia, APS have named the opening Plenary Lecture of their Annual APS Symposium the ‘Simpson Lecture’. Prof. Simpson has made major contributions to the field of analytical protein chemistry and pioneered many classical microsequencing strategies and micro-fractionation tools that have been further refined for proteomics. He has made key contributions to the field of cytokine biology including the determination of the primary sequence determination of IL-6, IL-9, LIF, rEGF and the stoichiometry of the IL-6 receptor system. He and his colleagues determined the three-dimensional structure (by X-ray crystallography) of the ectodomain of the human IL-6 receptor. Over the past two decades, he has developed a major program in proteomic analysis of colorectal cancer, especially in novel biomarker discovery, and extracellular vesicle (exosome)/secretome biology. Recently, his group reported a new class of membrane-encapsulated extracellular vesicles – midbody remnants (MBRs) that arise from symmetric abscission of cells during late cytokinesis - MBRs are molecularly distinct, at both protein and transcriptomic levels from exosomes and microparticles. He is on several editorial boards and was a Senior Editor on Proteomics as well as Proteomics: Clinical Applications. Prof. Simpson was elected an Honorary Member of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1996, awarded the AMRAD Pharmacia Medal from the Australian Society for Biochemistry & Molec. Biol., and was an elected councilor of the American Protein Society (1993-1996). In 1995 Prof. Simpson was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FATSE), in 1995 received the AMRAD Pharmacia Medal (awarded by the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), in 1996 was elected Honorary Life Member of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In 2003 Prof. Simpson was awarded the Centenary Medal from the Australian Government "For service to Australian society in research and development”, and in 2008 received the HUPO Distinguished Service Award “For indispensible contributions in his service to HUPO since the inauguration of HUPO in 2000”.
Prof. Simpson is listed as one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds (2015, Thompson-Reuter), and a Highly Cited Author (top 1% in the field of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology - Clarivate/WoS) for 9 consecutive years 2015-2023.
Prof. Simpson is listed in “Stanford University List of top 1% of World’s most influential scientists” for 2022/2023.
He has published >553 research publications, has an h-index of 113 with 64,217 citations (h-index since 2019 of 55 with 17,286 citations) and holds 14 patents. Average for last 5 years (2019-2023): 3,195 citations per year.
With the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Prof. Simpson has written three leading textbooks on proteomics – Proteins and Proteomics: A Laboratory Manual (2003), Purifying Proteins for Proteomics: A Laboratory Manual (2004) and Basic Methods in Protein Purification and Analysis: A Laboratory Manual (2009) – with over 10,000 copies sold to date. He has edited three textbooks devoted to “Proteomic Analysis of Human Plasma/Serum” (Springer) published in 2010, 2017 and 2022. In 2018 he published a review entitled “Extracellular vesicles in cancer—implications for future improvements in cancer care” R Xu, et al. and RJ Simpson in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, 15 (10), 617.
Prof. Michael S. Wolfe
University of Kansas, USA
Title: Proteolytic Functions and Dysfunctions of Gamma-Secretase: In Search of the Pathogenic Trigger of Alzheimer’s Disease
Michael S. Wolfe received his B.S. in chemistry in 1984 from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science and Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry in 1990 from the University of Kansas. After postdoctoral stints at the University of Kansas (medicinal chemistry) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (cell biology), he joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee in Memphis in 1994. In 1999, he moved to Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where his work focused on understanding the molecular basis of Alzheimer’s and related disorders and identifying effective approaches for pharmacological intervention, becoming Professor of Neurology in 2008. He joined the University of Kansas faculty in 2016 as the Mathias P. Mertes Professor of Medicinal Chemistry. Awards for his work include the Sato Memorial International Award in bioorganic and medicinal chemistry from the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (2003), the MetLife Award for Biomedical Research (2008), a Zenith Fellows Award from the Alzheimer’s Association (2008), and the Potamkin Prize from the American Academy of Neurology (2009).
Prof. Vladimir Torchilin
Northeastern University, USA
Title: Engineering of stimuli-sensitive drug delivery systems
Vladimir Torchilin got his M.S, Ph.D., and D.Sc. degrees from the Moscow State University and currently serves as a University Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Nanomedicine, Northeastern University, Boston. He has published more than 450 original papers, more than 200 reviews and book chapters, wrote and edited 15 books, and holds more than 40 patents. Google Scholar shows more than 90,000 citations of his papers with H-index of 132. He is Editor-in-Chief of Current Drug Discovery Technologies and Drug Delivery, Co-Editor of Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and on the Editorial Boards of many other journals. He received more than $20 M from the governmental and industrial sources in research funding. He is the member of the European Academy of Sciences and has multiple national and international honors and awards. In 2011, Times Higher Education ranked him number 2 among top world scientists in pharmacology for the period of 2000-2010. In 2021 Elsevier/Stanford analysis ranked him as a single highest-cited researcher among more than 130,000 ranked researches in the area of Pharmacology/Pharmacy. He is also 2023 Clarivat Citation Laureate.
Prof. Bruce J. Aronow
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, USA
Title: Multimodal dataverse-based construction of biological system models that enable identification and reasoning into causes, effects, treatments, and preventions of diseases.
