Breakfast Breakout Roundtable Discussions

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 | 8:00-8:55 AM

These are informal, moderated discussions with brainstorming and interactive problem solving, allowing participants from diverse backgrounds to exchange ideas and experiences and develop future collaborations around a focused topic.

Table 1: From Bench to Bedside to Industry

Moderator: Colleen Delaney, MD, MSc, Founder and CSO, Executive Vice President, Research and Development, Nohla Therapeutics

• The development of a cell therapy derived from cord blood CD34+ cells
• The transition from basic science discovery to IND enabling studies and CMC development
• The development of first in human clinical trials to evaluate the product developed within academia
• Targeting trained immunity and macrophage reprogramming in cancer
• Decision-making and lessons learned around how and when to ultimately spin out technology from academia into a new biotech start-up

Table 2: Clinical Development of CAR – NK Cells – Challenges and Opportunities

NEW Moderator: Rizwan Romee, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Haploidentical Donor Transplant Program, Oncology/BMT and Leukemia Program, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School

• Relative resistance of NK cells to genetic manipulation (compared to T cells)
• How can we overcome the limitation in the in vitro and in vivo expansion capacity of NK cells
• How do the future CAR´s should look like for NK cell based therapies (inducible in vivo expansion, tonic signalling, universal CARs / CAR-PARK)

Table 3: Targeting Dendritic Cells to Enhance T Cells Responses in Cancer

Moderator: Sonia Feau, PhD, Associate Director, Immunology, Oncorus

• Challenges and success of the different approaches: cell therapy, PAMPs agonists, vaccination
• How to specifically target them?
• What is the next generation of DCs modulators?