Events

Location: Lobby
Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

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The vast majority of your body’s bacteria reside in your gut. These bacteria (microbes), live inside and on any tissue of your body (including your gut), exerting a profound impact on your health and just about every bodily process. This is your microbiome.
Allergies, autoimmunity, depression and other inflammatory diseases are increasing at alarming rates and have all been associated with impaired microbiome health.
This evening will be all about the microbiome — how exactly does it influence our lifestyle and well-being? Why is it relevant in drug development and for which therapeutic areas does it have the most potential?
Please join us at LabCentral in the heart of Kendall Square’s innovation district, as we explore the significance of the microbiome and its commercial value. What is fact and what is fiction? A diverse set of speakers from Big Pharma and rising new stars from the biotech startup world will talk about their vision for the microbiome.

Keynote Speakers

• Dean Falb, PhD is Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Synlogic Therapeutics, a venture-backed start-up company in the human microbiome space.
• Alex Tucker is the Program Lead at Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based synthetic biology company that makes and sells engineered organisms.

Panelists:

• Azza A.Gadir, PhD (Moderator) is a postdoctoral scientist working on the Immunological mechanisms that underlie food allergy at Harvard University/Boston Childrens’ Hospital.
• Arpita Maiti, PhD is Senior Director, External Science & Innovation (ES&I) at Pfizer where she is a member of the external opportunities (discovery to Proof of Concept) search and evaluation team for Inflammation & Immunology.
• Bernat Olle  is Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of ‎Vedanta Biosciences, Inc. which is developing a novel class of therapies based on bacterial consortia that modulate interactions between the human microbiome and the host immune system.
• Philip Strandwitz,PhD, is Co-Founder and CEO, Holobiome which translates microbiome science into novel therapeutics to treat diseases of the central and enteric nervous systems. He is a specialist in the microbiome, with a focus on the gut-brain-axis.