Progress toward Meaningful Disease Modification in Proteinopathies and Neurodegenerative Disorders 2022

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Suzhou, China 
Postponed to March 2022

Application Deadline: TBA


Organized by:

Sam Gandy, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York

Li-Huei Tsai, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge

 

The Deans of Meetings and Courses at Cold Spring Harbor Asia in Suzhou, China, and at Cold Spring Harbor Main Campus, on Long Island, New York, USA are delighted to announce the inaugural offering of an exciting learning and information exchange event aimed at scientists from all professional levels across the spectra of both academic and pharmaceutical enterprises.   Students with at least an undergraduate level of biological sciences are welcome, as are later career biology faculty and entrepreneurs.

 

The event (“CSH Asia Human Neurological Disease” or CSHAHND) will be aimed at advancing and exchanging information in order to accelerate progress in the fight against various forms of degeneration of the human brain.  A key novelty of the CSHAHND event will be the incorporation and merger of formats of both courses and "hot topics" meetings. 

The strategies underpinning the development of this novel merged format are several.  First and foremost, current approaches to neurodegenerative diseases have rapidly evolved toward the inclusion of numerous high-tech and/or high level computational strategies that have been refined only very recently.  Yet, a working understanding of these new “big data” technolologies in order to follow, participate in, or lead state of the art neurological investigation,

 

Multiscale integrated approaches, human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) systems, brain organoids, and network level neuromodulation are but a few examples of the methods now applied toward elucidation of mechanisms underlying proteinopathies and neurodegenerative diseases and toward the targeting of those mechanisms in drug development and using non-invasive intervention approaches.

 

  *   The CSHAHND program will begin with ~ 3 full days of state-of-the-art reviews of high tech/big data/iPSCs/organoids/neuromodulation methodology delivered by faculty who are experts currently working in and/or playing leadership roles in each area.  Many of these faculty will accomplish this challenge by delivery both didactic material as well as their newest unpublished data, all of which will be conducted in highly interactive sessions, moderated by CSHAHND directors and/or faculty.

 

  *   Where possible, we will include examples of interventions and/or compounds that have been judged to provide meaningful clinical benefits to proteopathy and/or neurodegenerative diseases.  Experts from industry and academia will discuss these examples of interventions that now, in some parts of the world, have secured the regulatory approval of their governments.

 

  *   The remainder of the program will be led by experts in each of several key disease areas will present both an overview of the status of understanding and/or intervening in each disease and examples of the current strategies being employed by his/her laboratory research group.  These diseases will include (among others):

 

o   Alzheimer's disease, amyloid angiopathy, and amyloid conformer toxicity

o   Vascular dementia (aka VCID, for “vascular cognitive impairment and dementia”)

o   Genetic, sporadic and post-traumatic tauopathies (e.g., frontotemporal dementia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy)

o   Typical and variant prionopathies of humans and other mammals (e.g., typical and variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, chronic wasting disease)

o   Parkinson’s disease and other synucleinopathies (e.g., Lewy body dementia)

o   Huntington’s disease and other trinucleotide repeat diseases

o   Retinal degeneration

 

Speakers will be encouraged to remain at the CSHA site in Suzhou for as many days as possible and to attend and join in the discussions at their leisure.  In so doing, the Directors aim to offer to our international audience the most in-depth program and broadest possible representation of strategies and opinions that may vary widely.

 

Attendees will also have the opportunity to share their ideas, results, and/or both with our faculty of experts.  Each attendee is encouraged to arrive having mentally prepared to present his or her ideas and/or progress and/or challenges in highly informal “chalk talk” sessions.  Sufficient time will be set aside for each attendee to present such a “chalk talk”.

 

We look forward to welcoming the directors, faculty and attendee participants to the Cold Spring Harbor Asia campus in Suzhou in the spring of 2020.



2021 Invited lecturers include (Lecturer, Affiliation, Region):

Zoe Arvanitakis, RUSH, Chicago IL

Karen Hsiao Ashe, Univ MN, Minneapolis MN
Tim Bartels, UCL, London UK

Diane Chan, MIT, Cambridge MA & MGH, Boston, MA

John Collinge, UCL, London UK

Joel Dudley, ISMMS, New York NY

Michelle Ehrlich, ISMMS, New York NY

Li Gan, Weill Cornell, New York NY

Sam Gandy, ISMMS, New York City, NY

Aaron Gitler, Stanford Univ, Palo Alto CA

Soyon Hong, UCL, London UK

Ephraim Katz, Pharma Consultant, New York NY

Jonathan Kipnis, Univ VA, Charlottesville VA

Manolis Kellis, MIT, Cambridge MA

Kenneth Kosik, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Blair Leavitt, Univ Brit Columbia, Vancouver BC

Efrat Levy, NYU, New York NY & NKI, Orangeburg NY

Colin Masters, Florey Inst, Univ Melb, Melbourne VIC

Scott Noggle, NYSCF, New York NY

Leonard Petrucelli, Mayo, Jacksonville FL

Wenjuan Zhang, MRC, Cambridge UK

Annabelle Singer, Georgia Tech & Emory Univ, Atlanta GA

Li-Huei Tsai, MIT, Cambridge MA

Stephen Tsang, Columbia Univ, New York NY

John van Swieten, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Tracy Young-Pearse, Harvard, Cambridge MA & BWH, Boston MA

Yingyue Zhou, Washington Univ, St Louis MO


REGULAR PRICING (INCLUDING TUITION, BOARD AND LODGING): To be announced  


Please note stipends are available to offset tuition costs. No payment is due until the selection decisions are made but any applicant requiring support should request this in writing during the online application. The admissions process is need-blind, your financial situation will not be considered before admission decisions are made.