Industrial Workshop, DKFZ

The Industrial Workshop was held at the BioQuant Building at DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany, from 18-19 November 2021. It was the first in-person meeting since the pandemic and most ESRs were able to attend.

The ESRs gave presentations on their research, and there were two scientific talks by Melania Barile (University of Hong Kong) and Kevin Thurley (University Hospital Bonn).

On Friday, Christoph Niederalt (Bayer AG) gave a one-day workshop where participants were able to run a fictional pharmaceutical company pursuing four drug candidates that are in different development stages; the task was to steer the whole process from drug discovery to the final approval by the regulatory authorities with limited R&D budget so that not all candidates can be developed simultaneously.

Schedule:

Thursday 18 November

09:00 - 09:15 Welcome, Grant Lythe
09:15 - 09:55 Melania Barile, (virtual talk), "RNA velocity, fate mapping, modelling: tools to investigate haematopoiesis"
10:00 - 11:00 Research presentations in Work Package 3: ESRs 12 - 14
-- Laura Mora Bitria, "Role of inhibitory KIRs (iKIRs) during T cell-mediated autoimmune responses in Type 1 Diabetes"
-- Flavia Feliciangeli, "CD8+ T cell exhaustion in cancer, Project update"
-- Van Thuy Truong, "Multi-scale model of T cell mediated tumour-immune interaction"
11:00 - 11:15 Break

11:15 - 12:55 Research presentations in Work Package 2: ESRs 7 - 11
-- Carina Bruckmaier, "Towards an understanding of T cell dynamics in human tissues"
-- Erdem Şanal
-- Noor Kherreh, "Predicting Immunogenicity using Mutational Signatures and MHC-I genotype"
-- Daniel Luque Duque, "Stochastic modelling of TCR-epitope recognition in the context of cross-reactivity"
-- María Ruiz Ortega, "Statistical Analysis of Sharing in Antibody Repertoires"
12:55 - 14:00 Lunch

14:00 - 14:40 Kevin Thurley, "Response-time modeling of immune-cell interaction dynamics"
14:45 - 15:45 Research presentations from Work Package 1: ESRs 1 - 3
-- Sarah Benedetto, "Evolutionary dynamics of oligodendrogliomas"
-- Alessandro Greco, "Multi-omic analysis of hematopoiesis in control and sepsis condition"
-- Léa Sta, "IL-7R mathematical modelling: algebraic expressions for amplitude and EC50"
15:45 - 16:00 Break

16:00 - 17:00 Research presentations from Work Package 1: ESRs 4 - 6
-- Elena de Dios Panal, "Back to nature - Leukocyte dynamics in a more natural mouse model"
-- Charandeep Kaur, "Lineage and Maintenance of Human CD8 T Cell Memory"
-- Giulia Belluccini, "Multi-stage model of cell proliferation and death"
17:00 - 18:00 ESR forum meeting
19:00 - Meeting dinner, Backmulde

Friday 19 November

09:00 - 12:30 Workshop, Bayer AG: PharmaSimulation - Interactive Case Study: "New Therapies for
Cancer Patients" (Including a break at around 11:00)
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 16:00 Workshop, part 2: The Pharma R&D paradigm; Clinical Utility (Including a break)