SILVERTHORNE, CO – October 12, 2016 – Keystone Symposia will convene the first conference of its 2016-2017 season and the first in its 2016-17 Global Health Series – on "Translational Vaccinology for Global Health" – at the Park Plaza Riverbank in London, UK, October 25-29, 2016. The four-day open conference is part of the Keystone Symposia Global Health Series, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has also funded travel awards for 43 investigators from 13 different low- and middle-income countries to attend. The sessions begin on Wednesday, October 25; the afternoon session that day will be held jointly with the closing session of the Grand Challenges conference for that program's grantees.
Scientific organizers of the Keystone Symposia conference are Drs. Christopher L. Karp of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, USA; Gagandeep Kang of Chrisian Medical College in India; and Rino Rappuoli of GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines in Siena, Italy.
The conference will focus on addressing the issues that make vaccine development and implementation unacceptably long, plus brainstorming ways to remove or mitigate these hurdles. Plenary sessions during the four days of the conference will feature presentations by speakers such as Peter D. Kwong of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH; Sir Andrew J. McMichael of the Unviersity of Oxford; Anna P. Durbin of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Andrew J. Pollard of the University of Oxford; Rafi Ahmed of Emory University School of Medicine; and Beate Kampmann of Imperial College School of Medicine and MRC The Gambia. Supplementing these plenary sessions will be workshops with short talks showcasing the work of junior investigators and late-breaking research. The closing keynote address will be given by Dr. Chris Wilson of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The conference will focus on the lessons learned from vaccine work covering a wide spectrum of diseases, including dengue, malaria, TB, typhoid and enteric fever, HPV, herpes zoster, and even cancer. Overall, it aims to bring together those pioneering novel, creative solutions to these problems of global vaccine discovery and development across the academic/biotech/product development partner/pharma spectrum." According to Dr. Jane Peterson, Keystone Symposia's Chief Executive Officer, "For the tenth consecutive year, we are very pleased to partner with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in bringing a conference to the site of the annual Grand Challenges conference and hopefully engaging a wider scientific audience in tackling the greatest global health challenges of our time."
Beginning in 2006, Keystone Symposia has received grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund conferences in the Keystone Symposia Global Health Series. This year for the first time, the Keystone Symposia Global Health Series has been expanded to include conferences beyond infectious diasease. In addition to 2017 conferences on tuberculosis, malaria, hemorraghic fever viruses and HIV, the 2016-2017 Series includes conferences on cancer immunotherapy, phytobiomes, and joint conferences on inflammation-driven cancer/the microbiome and diabetes/obesity.
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About Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology
Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, has been conducting internationally renowned, open scientific conferences since its founding as UCLA Symposia in 1972 and has been headquartered in Summit County, Colorado, USA since 1990.
It will convene 60 conferences in the 2016-2017 season, the majority of which will take place between January and April 2017, on topics ranging from cancer and immunology to neuroscience and genomics. Registration fees are supplemented by generous financial support from corporate, foundation and individual donors as well as government grants.
More information on the vaccines conference can be found at http://www.keystonesymposia.org/16S1 and on the organization and its meetings at http://www.keystonesymposia.org and http://www.keystonesymposia.org/meetings, respectively. Details about the conferences in the Global Health Series are available at http://www.keystonesymposia.org/GlobalHealth.
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