Forty-minute masterclasses
We're delighted that a number of our Festival supporters are holding masterclasses during the programme to give even more value to delegates during the meeting.
Tips and tricks to improve your patch clamp experiments
14:00 - 14:40 Tuesday 13th April 2021
Join a panel of electrophysiology experts from Scientifica and labs across the globe who will share their tips to help you improve your patch clamp experiments. Make this notoriously tricky technique easier and become more efficient at patching cells, improving the speed and quality of your data collection.
With Dr Rodrigo Bammann and Dr Marco Navarro, both experts at patch clamp!
When registering, please submit the topics you would most like to be discussed, and the panel will share their tips relating to the most popular topics.
- Festival-goers: simply include in your Festival agenda to attend.
- Non Festival-goers: register FOR FREE here
Supported by Scientifica
MEG and biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease
12:20 - 13:00 Wednesday 14th April 2021
What is MEG and how can it be used to drive new research into Alzheimer's Disease? Attend this special session, hosted by MEGIN, to find out more about how MEG biomarkers can track and identify stages of dementia in the human brain.
- Paul Furlong, Aston Brain Centre - Introduction to Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
- Fernando Maestu, Director for Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Center for Biomedical Technology of Madrid - MEG biomarkers in the Alzheimer's Disease continuum: correlation with current biomarkers
- Lauri Parkonnen and Rasmus Zetter, MEGIN - On-scalp MEG with optically-pumped magnetometers
Plus plenty of chance for Q&A with participants.
Supported by MEGIN
Accelerating innovative drug discovery with the Psychiatry Consortium: the KALRN story
12:20 - 13:00 BST, Thursday 15th April 2021
The Psychiatry Consortium aims to enable a drug-discovery pipeline by connecting academic innovations with industry expertise to robustly validate new therapeutic targets and strategies to treat psychiatric diseases.
In December 2020, the Consortium launched its first funded project - a partnership between the University of Oxford, the Earlham Institute, and the global pharmaceutical companies Biogen Inc and Boehringer Ingelheim - to investigate novel human brain-specific proteins produced by KALRN, as a potential new drug target for the treatment of schizophrenia.
This roundtable event will provide an overview of the scientific research, offer insights into the project development process, and highlight the successes and challenges of pursuing this research via a managed academic-industry partnership, from both the academic and industry perspective.
- Laura Ajram (Chair), Medicines Discovery Catapult
- Rob Pinnock, Biogen
- Bastian Hengerer, Boehringer Ingelheim
- Liz Tunbridge, University of Oxford
- Wilfried Hearty, Earlham Institute
Supported by the Psychiatry Consortium
Humanised microglia models to study genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease
14:00 - 14:40 BST, Thursday 15th April 2021
With Renzo Mancuso (VIB Center for Molecular Neurology) speaking about “Humanised microglia models to study genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease”, and Eliza Nent, Neuroscience Product Manager from Miltenyi Biotec.
Microglia and neuroinflammation are central players in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, modelling certain aspects of microglia biology in AD remains a challenge due to the limited similarity between mouse and human microglia in terms of expression of key AD-risk genes, as well as the inability to reproduce AD pathological hallmarks (e.g amyloid plaques) in vitro. In this talk, Professor Mancuso will introduce you to MIGRATE, his new protocol to xenotransplant human iPSC-derived microglia in the mouse brain, and present you with some data on what can we learn with this system.
