Engineering Biology for Medicine

A Nature conference

May 19–22, 2019 Fitzpatrick Center, Durham, NC, USA

Innovation in research tends to spring where fields intersect. In applied biomedicine, technology and engineering approaches (that is, driven by real-world problems rather than motivated by discovery) are instrumental in advancing our knowledge of the biology of the human body and the mechanisms by which diseases alter it. Step-change improvements in medicine and health have been increasingly dominated by advances in technology, such as 'omics' tools, molecular imaging, engineered cells as therapeutics, computational drug design and microphysiological systems, and these advances have accelerated discoveries in biology that in turn are impacting medicine.

In partnership with Duke University's Biomedical Engineering Department — one of the most highly ranked and also one of the oldest in the United States — Nature Medicine and Nature Biomedical Engineering are organizing the conference Engineering biology for medicine. It will offer a broad perspective of state-of-the-art technological developments leveraging molecular engineering, cellular engineering and materials engineering for the manipulation of the human genome and epigenome, the immune system and diseased tissue, in the contexts of therapy, diagnostics, disease modelling and drug discovery, and across a broad range of disease types. The focus will be on engaging discussions about how to best harness human biology to devise strategies for probing, diagnosing and combating human disease.

Join us in Durham, NC, on Sunday May 19 to Wednesday May 22, 2019. We can guarantee that you will come back home with plenty of new ideas for your research, and that you will enjoy interacting with pioneers who are developing technologies for biomedical discovery or to advance medicine. See our list of speakers (also in the screenshot below) and our conference program.

We have also invited recipients of the 2018 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award who work at the interface of technology and medicine to speak about their funded highly innovative and high-impact New Innovator project. James Anderson, the NIH Deputy Director for Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, will introduce the New Innovator Award program on Sunday May 19.

Of the submitted abstracts for poster presentation (submission deadline: April 1st), we will select two for poster awards. The two awardees will be offered a 10-min oral slot in the afternoon of Tuesday, May 21, and will receive cash prizes. There will also be more poster awards from Nature Medicine and Nature Biomedical Engineering.

We are also organizing a lively panel discussion that will touch on a broad range of topics featured in the conference.

For more information about the conference, feel free to write to me, or use the comments section below.