Blueprints of Immunity: Designing the Next Generation of Antibodies

Professor Nico Callewaert is a senior full professor in biochemistry and biotechnology at Ghent University and serves as the director of the VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology. He leads the Medical Biotechnology Unit at VIB and is a principal investigator affiliated with both the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at UGent. Using glycobiology, microbial biotechnology, biological system's engineering and bio-analytics his laboratory focuses on developing innovative molecular technology to enable novel approaches to the study, diagnosis and treatment of disease. Current research focuses include development of glycomics and glycoproteomics-based biomarker assays for cancer diagnostics, notably the GlycoCirrhoTest, a serum marker for early detection of hepatocellular carcinoma risk in cirrhotic patients and engineering the interaction between the tuberculosis vaccine (Mycobacterium bovis BCG) and the immune system, for the purpose of designing a fully protective TB vaccine, which is a major and urgent global public health need.

Dr. Crowe is a leading expert on the molecular basis for human antibody-mediated immunity to viruses. His work on the genetic and structural basis for virus neutralization has elucidated fundamental principles of protein-protein interactions, while generating vaccines and monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that are being developed as drug candidates. Dr. Crowe is a pioneer in the study of immunity to emerging infectious agents and bioterror organisms, publishing seminal works on human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for many of the most pathogenic viruses that cause disease in humans.

Jean-Philippe Julien received his B.Sc. from McGill University, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute. In 2014, he joined the Molecular Medicine Program at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute and the Departments of Biochemistry and Immunology at the University of Toronto where he leads a team of multi-disciplinary researchers. His laboratory focuses on the molecular characterization of antibodies by studies of their interactions with a variety of viral, bacterial, parasitic and cell-surface antigens, providing the atomic blueprints for the development of next-generation therapeutics and vaccines. Notably, he is the Canada Research Chair in Structural Immunology and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Philip M. Kim is a professor at the University of Toronto at the Donnelly Centre and the Departments of Computer Science and Molecular Genetics. In his academic research, he has been developing novel machine learning methods for protein and peptide engineering and authored over 100 publications, 7 invention disclosures and 5 patent applications. He has co-founded several biotechnology companies, including Fable Therapeutics and TBG Therapeutics and serves as consultant and member of the scientific advisory board for others. Before setting up his lab in 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and an associate with McKinsey & Co. He holds a Ph.D. from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Physics and Biochemistry from the University of Tuebingen.