Tuesday, April 23, 2024
4/23/2024
ABSTRACT Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia conference entitled Innate Immune Memory: From Evolutionary Roots to Human Disease, organized by Drs. Mihai G. Netea, Shabaana A. Khader and Triantafyllos Chavakis. The conference will be held in Banff, Alberta, Canada from March 6-9, 2022. Memory characteristics of innate immune responses (also termed ‘trained immunity’) have been recognized only recently, with a multitude of studies demonstrating their importance for long-term broad protection against infections. Innate immune memory has been demonstrated to have deep evolutionary roots in plants and invertebrates, but also plays an important role in the host defense of vertebrates in general, and mammals in particular. In humans, innate immune memory is important for host defense against infections, and may enhance anti-tumor immunity, but can also contribute to pathogenesis in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The emergence of novel types of immunotherapy is having a profound impact on disease outcomes in several major pathologies such as cancer, autoimmune diseases and even severe infections. However, the immunotherapeutic research has largely focused on targeting adaptive immune cells (e.g., checkpoint inhibitors, CAR-T cells, monoclonal antibodies), with relatively little attention to innate immune cells. This conference intends to change this by serving as an international forum to highlight innate immune processes of relevance to immunotherapies. This meeting is a unique platform, in which researchers from several important fields (immunology, evolutionary biology, cancer biology, infectious diseases and physiology, clinical and health sciences) will be able to interact and exchange ideas, methods and build collaborations: this is emerging as one of the most exciting areas in immunology, and the proposed Keystone Symposium has the chance to give a strong impetus to this novel field of research.
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