Conferences  >  Medicine & Healthcare  >  Infectious Disease Medicine  >  Germany

EMBL Heidelberg

Infectious diseases are among the most prevalent causes of human illness and death in the world. Epidemics & pandemics have shaped human evolution and history, and although for a while there were considered a solved problem for the developed world, the recent past has showed us all why this is not the case. Antimicrobial resistance, global warming, human population size increase, modern lifestyles (urbanization, traveling), decrease of wild-life habitats for pathogen reservoirs all contribute to creating an ideal setting for infectious diseases becoming an even greater challenge in the future. This symposium will bring together experts working on different pathogens (viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites) and who rarely meet. It will cover a broad range of topics on the host-pathogen interface, highlighting the diversity in mechanisms and the convergence of strategies pathogens use to invade, hijack host machineries, proliferate within the host, cause disease and spread to other hosts. Infection biologists using systems biology, population genomics, genetics, cell and tissue biology, biochemistry and structural biology will meet to present the state-of-the-art of different fields. The emerging realisation that infections are often polymicrobial, pathogens can be opportunistic and can already reside for years as benign in our body, and that the microbiome can greatly impact infection onset and progress will provide a common thread of discussion across fields of different pathogenic agents. Discussions will fertilise transfer of technologies and know-how across fields, and set the ground for developing new strategies to tackle current bottlenecks in our ability to treat infections.

Catherine Casas-Saavedra;     Email: catherine.casas@embl.de

EMBL Heidelberg

Human microbiota – the collection of microbes living in and on our body – have a significant impact on human health and well-being. They have been associated with numerous diseases, yet we are still far from understanding their role in the context of lifestyle and genetics. Various initiatives are underway around the world to survey the human microbiota at several body sites, characterise them, understand their interactions with the human hosts, elucidate their role in diseases, and design possible therapeutic or dietary interventions. There is a new wave of studies mining the human microbiota for health-relevant bioactive compounds, for characterising specific microbial strains and for cataloguing the human microbiota from all across the globe. This conference will provide plentiful opportunities for researchers to learn about and to connect to important developments in studying the human microbiota.

EMBL Events;     Email: events@embl.de