The Microbiome in Health, Disease, and Therapeutics: Bugs, Guts and Drugs

Speakers

Organizers

Mercedes Beyna, MS

Pfizer Global Research and Development

Mercedes Beyna is a scientist in the Neuroscience Research Unit at Pfizer. Her research focuses on target identification and assay development in the areas of psychiatric as well as neurodegenerative disorders. Captivated by neuroscience, she has worked in the field for over 10 years, in both academic and industrial laboratory settings. Before joining pharmaceutical R&D, Mercedes held lab manager and senior lab technician positions at New York University (NYU). Mercedes attended Binghamton University, earning her undergraduate degree in Biology, and subsequently received her Master's Degree in Biology from NYU. As the Pfizer lead in the Biochemical Pharmacology Discussion Group at the New York Academy of Sciences, she enjoys developing interesting and educational symposia.

Robert Martone

Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence

Robert Martone is Neuroscience Therapeutic Area Lead for the Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence. He has extensive experience in the pharmaceutical industry leading neuroscience drug discovery and technology teams through all phases of discovery from target identification through clinical trials with expertise in both small molecule and protein therapeutics. He also has several years of academic research experience in molecular neurobiology, with a focus on the molecular genetics of familial neuropathies, and CNS tumor biomarker development.

Nilufer Seth, PhD

Pfizer Global Research and Development

Nilufer Seth is a scientist in the Host-Microbiome Interactions group in the Immuoscience Research Unit at Pfizer. She received her PhD from Medical College of Augusta, Augusta, Georgia in 1999 and joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for post-doctoral training. Her research focused on ex vivo isolation and study of pathogenic CD4 T cells from individuals with infections or autoimmune disease. She studied human HIV and HCV antigen-specific T cells and antigen-specific CD4 T cells from NOD mice using a novel method she developed to generate MHC class II tetramers. In 2007 she joined the Department of Inflammation and Immunology in Wyeth where she worked on programs that were targeting inflammatory cytokines and other therapeutic mechanisms targeting B and T cells. Currently at Pfizer she is part of a group that is dedicated to discovering medicines that will reshape the treatment of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases by harnessing strategies and pathways used by the human gut microbiota to maintain immune homeostasis.

Richard Snyder, MS

Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence

Richard Snyder is the Assay Development Group Lead for the Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence. He has extensive experience in de novo immunoassay development on most commercial platforms. Additionally, he has several years of industry experience in therapeutic drug monitoring assay development for in vitro diagnostic use, as well as several years of academic research experience in high-throughput genetic analysis focused on metabolic bone disorders.

Jennifer Henry, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Speakers

David Artis, PhD

University of Pennsylvania

Dr Artis completed his doctoral research training at the University of Manchester, UK focusing on regulation of immunity and inflammation in the intestine. Following receipt of a Wellcome Trust Prize Traveling Fellowship, he undertook his fellowship training at the University of Pennsylvania where he continued his research training in examining the regulation of immune responses at barrier surfaces. Dr Artis joined the faculty at Penn in 2005 and became an Associate Professor of Microbiology in 2010. Dr Artis has developed a research program focused on dissecting the pathways that regulate innate and adaptive immune cell function at barrier surfaces in the context of health and disease. His research program also encompasses a significant effort to translate research findings in pre-clinical models into patient-based studies of immune-mediated diseases. Dr Artis is funded by NIH, CCFA and BWF and has been the recipient of Young Investigator Awards from AAI, CCFA and ICIS, the Colyton Prize, the Stanley Cohen Prize and the AAI-BD Biosciences Investigator Award.

Stephen M. Collins, MBBS

McMaster University, Ontario, Canada

Dr Collins obtained his medical training at University College and Westminster Hospital London UK. He trained in gastroenterology at McMaster University in Canada before completing 3 years of research training in cell biology at the Digestive Diseases Branch, National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland USA. He has been a staff gastroenterologist at McMaster University since 1981 and is currently the Associate Dean for Research. His research focuses on the roles of microbes in the initiation and maintenance of functional gastrointestinal disorders, and on interactions between the intestinal microbiome and the gut-brain axis.

Peter S. DiStefano, PhD

Second Genome, Inc.

Dr. DiStefano is Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Second Genome. He has over 25 years of experience in pharma and biotech, holding several positions in drug discovery and development. From 2001–2011 he was Chief Scientific Officer and Sr. VP of R&D at Elixir pharmaceuticals, transforming the science of aging platform into a metabolic disease clinical pipeline. Prior to that he was Sr. Director of Neurobiology at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (1997–2010). From 1991–1997 he was Sr. Staff Scientist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Dr. DiStefano started his career at Abbott Laboratories (1986–1991) in Neuroscience Drug Discovery. In 2010 he founded Acylin Therapeutics, Inc., a biotech start-up company in Seattle, WA focused on cancer therapies. He currently serves on the Board of Directors at Acylin. Dr. DiStefano received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Kenyon College and his PhD in Pharmacology from Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. He did his post-doctoral training in Pharmacology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has co-authored over 100 manuscripts, reviews and book chapters, is a co-inventor on 12 issued patents and has taken 8 drugs into clinical development.

Michael A. Fischbach, PhD

University of California, San Francisco

Michael Fischbach is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF and a member of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Fischbach is a recipient of the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, a Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, a Medical Research Award from the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Young Investigator Grant for Probiotics Research from the Global Probiotics Council. His laboratory uses a combination of genomics and chemistry to identify and characterize small molecules from microbes, with an emphasis on the human microbiome. Fischbach received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard in 2007, where he studied the role of iron acquisition in bacterial pathogenesis and the biosynthesis of antibiotics. Before coming to UCSF, he spent two years as an independent fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital coordinating a collaborative effort based at the Broad Institute to develop genomics-based approaches to the discovery of small molecules from microbes. Fischbach is a member of the scientific advisory boards of Second Genome, Reckitt Bensicker, and Warp Drive Bio, and a consultant for Achaogen, Bayer CropScience, and Genentech.

Dirk Gevers, PhD

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Dirk Gevers joined the Broad Institute in early 2008 as a computational biologist shortly after the National Institutes of Health funded four major US Microbial Sequencing Centers to take on the Human Microbiome Project, an ambitious initiative to understand the microorganisms that live in and on humans. Within this large-scale metagenomics project, he has spearheaded the development of high-throughput capabilities for processing, organizing, and interpreting metagenomic datasets that enable a comprehensive examination of microbial communities.

In 2010, Gevers was appointed group leader of Microbial Systems and Communities in the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program. Together with his colleagues and collaborators, he is taking on several projects that bring together advanced sequence-based technologies and novel bioinformatic tools to characterize the vast complexity of the human microbiome in both health and disease.

Gevers received his PhD in biochemistry from Ghent University, Belgium, in 2002 and has completed postdoctoral training at Ghent and at MIT in bioinformatics, comparative and evolutionary genome analysis, and microbial ecology.

Joseph A. Murray, MD

Mayo Clinic

Born in Ireland, Dr. Murray attended medical school at the National University of Ireland in Galway (1983–1984) followed by internal medicine training at Trinity College in Dublin (1984–1986) and internal medicine and gastroenterology training at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin (1986–1988). He further trained at the University of Iowa as a Fellow in Gastroenterology and Hepatology (1988–1990), and earned his Doctorate of Medicine by thesis from the National University of Ireland in Galway in 1992. Dr. Murray was on the faculty of the University of Iowa from 1990-1998, attaining the rank of Associate Professor of Medicine. In 1998, he joined Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and is a consultant in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and the Department of Immunology. He was appointed Professor of Medicine in 2004 and designated a research Clinician Investigator in January 2010. Dr. Murray has a strong background and experience in basic and clinical gastroenterology, focusing primarily on celiac disease and immune-related disorders of the small intestine. Dr. Murray is a member of many national/international professional scientific committees and review boards, including membership in the Gastrointestinal Mucosal Pathobiology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. He has served on editorial boards of several journals and is a senior associate editor for the American Journal of Gastroenterology. He is the author/co-author of more than 235 scientific publications and 33 chapters. His work is funded by the NIH, private foundations and commercial entities. He is president of the North American Society for the Study of Celiac Disease, a fellow of the American Gastroenterologic Association and American College of Gastroenterology and a member of American Association of Immunology, American Motility Society, and serves on advisory boards for lay support groups and consults with several companies on the topic of celiac disease. His current work spans basic and translational research in the realm of celiac disease focusing on immunology, genetics of the disease and immune responses to food proteins.

Jeremy K. Nicholson, FMedSci

Imperial College London

Professor Nicholson obtained his PhD from London University (1980) and after numerous London University appointments (Full Professor, 1992), he became Head of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College London (1998) and then Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer (2009). He is the Director of the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre and the Imperial-Institute of Cancer Research joint Centre for Systems Oncology. Professor Nicholson has authored over 500 peer-reviewed papers on molecular aspects of complex system failure and molecular spectroscopy. He leads the Imperial Biomedical Research Centre and AHSC research programmes in Stratified Medicine for optimising translational medicine for patient safety and healthcare delivery. His research has been recognised by awards such as: The Royal Society of Chemistry Silver (1992) and Gold (1997) Medals for Analytical Science and Chemistry respectively; The UK Chromatographic Society Jubilee Medal (1994); Pfizer Prize for Chemical and Medicinal Technology (2002); RSC medal for Chemical Biology (2003); The RSC Interdisciplinary Prize (2008); The RSC Theophilus Redwood Lectureship (2008); The Pfizer Global Research Prize for Chemistry (2006); The NIH Stars in Cancer and Nutrition Distinguished Lecturer (2010) and The Semelweiss-Budapest Prize for Biomedicine (2010). He is a Fellow of The Royal College of Pathologists, The Royal Society of Chemistry, The Society of Biology and The British Toxicological Society. In 2010 he was elected Fellow of The UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2012 he was elected as the first Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society and in 2013 an Honorary Member of the US Society of Toxicology. He currently holds honorary professorships at 8 Universities including two Institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is a founder director of Metabometrix, an Imperial College spin-off company (founded 2001) specializing in molecular phenotyping, clinical diagnostics and toxicological screening.

Lita M. Proctor, PhD

National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH

Lita M. Proctor received her PhD in Oceanography from State University of New York - Stony Brook. She was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first appointment was in the Department of Oceanography, Florida State University and her second appointment, at the Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Beginning in 2002, Dr. Proctor served as a program director at the National Science Foundation in both the Geosciences and the Biosciences Directorates, where she managed a wide range of microbiological, ecological, research resources and bioinformatics extramural research programs. Dr. Proctor joined the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH, where she is responsible for oversight and coordination of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), an 8-year, $194M trans-NIH Common Fund Initiative to create a community resource for this field.

Dr. Proctor is a member of the American Society for Microbiology, the International Human Microbiome Consortium and the Genome Standards Consortium. She also serves as a National Children's Study Scholar and chairs the trans-NIH Microbiome Working Group. She is an author or co-author of over 25 peer-reviewed scientific publications.

Nilufer Seth, PhD

Pfizer Global Research and Development

Nilufer Seth is a scientist in the Host-Microbiome Interactions group in the Immuoscience Research Unit at Pfizer. She received her PhD from Medical College of Augusta, Augusta, Georgia in 1999 and joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for post-doctoral training. Her research focused on ex vivo isolation and study of pathogenic CD4 T cells from individuals with infections or autoimmune disease. She studied human HIV and HCV antigen-specific T cells and antigen-specific CD4 T cells from NOD mice using a novel method she developed to generate MHC class II tetramers. In 2007 she joined the Department of Inflammation and Immunology in Wyeth where she worked on programs that were targeting inflammatory cytokines and other therapeutic mechanisms targeting B and T cells. Currently at Pfizer she is part of a group that is dedicated to discovering medicines that will reshape the treatment of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases by harnessing strategies and pathways used by the human gut microbiota to maintain immune homeostasis.