Pre-Conference Workshop Day
Tuesday, June 14 2022
Workshop A
Defining the Mechanistic Role of Myeloid Cell Populations in Tumorigenesis with Patient Samples & Identifying Novel Targets & Biomarkers for Clinical Development
8am-10am
• Decoding RNA signals, discussing the contributions of RNA sequencing to the field, and highlighting remaining limitations
• Investigating the phenotypic diversity and plasticity, and characterizing cell subsets
• Drawing functional conclusions to determine how different cell phenotypes impact therapeutic efficacy to inform combination approaches, using RNA analysis and proteomics
• Combining multiple datasets to create a comprehensive picture of the myeloid compartment, and draw functional conclusions from phenotypic data
• Analyzing the shared characteristics of the myeloid compartment across multiple tumor indications to identify which myeloid cells are present, and how their function varies, in human cancer
Workshop Leaders:
James Rubenstein
Haematologist-Oncologist
University of California San Francisco
Jasper Mullenders
Director Translational Research
Scenic Biotech
Workshop B
Modeling the Myeloid Compartment with In Vitro, Ex Vivo, and In Vivo Technologies to Enhance Translation and Mechanistic Understanding
10:30pm-12:30pm
• Highlighting the nuances of the tumor myeloid microenvironment vs. normal myeloid cells, and how to integrate this into model development
• Characterizing and translating broader and more diverse sub-cell types using models
• Managing lack of myeloid cell marker conservation across species and proposing industry solutions to enable gold standards for preclinical work, shared through a robust IND-ready preclinical package example
• Sharing work to recapitulate the tumor microenvironment and study cellular dynamics ex vivo
• Extracting and maintaining myeloid cells in models without modulating the myeloid phenotype
• Examining shared mechanisms that are apparent through in vitro and in vivo models
Workshop Leaders:
Jeffrey Pollard
Director of the MRC Center for
Reproductive Health
The University of Edinburgh
Kareem Azab
Associate Professor, Cancer
Biology Division, Department of
Radiation Oncology
Washington University St. Louis
Workshop C
Enhancing Target Identification & Validation to Take Aim at Therapeutically Significant Targets & Investigate their Functional Impact with RNASeq Bioinformatics Studies
1:30pm-4:00pm
• Considering the desirable characteristics of myeloid cell targets, and contrasting the benefits and challenges of targeting different cellular mechanisms such as cross-presentation, polarization, and pathway modulation
• Defining the cause of immune suppression by myeloid cells, identifying master regulators, and discussing which processes in a signaling pathway can be effectively targeted
• Selecting targets on myeloid subsets which are tumor-specific
• Discussing the challenges of demonstrating single agent effect on target validation, and tips to overcome these
• Sharing in vivo target validation workflows, and exploring translational and preclinical data to support target validation alongside clinical proof of myeloid targeting
• Decoding RNA signals, discussing the contributions of RNA sequencing to the field, and highlighting remaining limitations
Workshop Leaders:
Kamal Puri
CSO
OncoResponse
Tatiana Novobrantseva
Co-Founder & CSO
Verseau Therapeutics
Igor Feldman
Co-Founder & CAO
Verseau Therapeutics