CSHL 2026 Protein Homeostasis in Health & Disease Conference - Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Conference on Protein Homeostasis in Health and Disease April 21 - 25, 2026 ABSTRACT This proposal is a request for financial support for a meeting on PROTEIN HOMEOSTASIS IN HEALTH AND DISEASE to be held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from April 21 - 25, 2026. This meeting is the premier international forum for presentation of new results in this exciting area across biology and medicine and is attended by representatives from virtually every major laboratory in the field. The explosion of new information on how the folded state of proteins is acquired and maintained in vivo and the relevance of this process to essentially all biological processes for healthy aging and risk for degenerative diseases of aging including neurodegeneration, cancer, and metabolism guarantees an excitement and urgency of this meeting. To honor the previous more-than-a-decade organizers and recognize their immense contributions to the field, Drs. Hartl and Morimoto, we will feature them in a keynote opening session. Because of the recent developments on stress signaling in aging and disease, we will next focus on cell stress response signaling, chaperone mechanisms and co-translational folding and ribosome quality control. We will then explore the roles of intrinsically disordered proteins and their roles in biological condensate formation, protein degradative mechanisms, and organellar proteostasis and spatial quality control in Aging and Disease. We will close with a session on protein misfolding and aggregation in aging as well as age-associated disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and ALS. The themes of aging, proteostasis failure, and diseases of protein misfolding are well integrated throughout each session, and emerging principles on protein client interactions and alternate protein conformations will be dominantly displayed. The diverse protein quality control strategies used by compartments of the cell to ensure the integrity of the secretory and organellar pathways during times of protein folding stress will be represented by emerging topics on spatial quality control within a cell. The field of heat shock proteins and molecular chaperones has grown exponentially and draws interest not only from traditional scientific disciplines in the basic sciences but also from diverse areas of biomedical research including neurodegenerative disease, infectious diseases, cancer, heart disease and aging. Overall, the meeting will have eight lecture sessions, two poster sessions, two lightning presentation sessions, a panel discussion on therapeutic approaches targeting proteostasis, and a daily lunch/mentoring session with the speakers. Each session will consist of eight to nine oral presentations. For each session, we have invited two speakers, who will also serve as co-chairs. The remaining speakers in each session will be selected from the submitted abstracts. All speakers will have 15 minutes talk time. In addition, each lightning sessions will have 10 pre-selected poster presenters, who will have the opportunity to highlight the key features of their work in 2-min talks. This balance of talks allows the meeting to feature presentations by leading scientists, to be responsive to exciting new developments, and to encourage participation from investigators new to this field.
