Due to the uncertainty of travel and large gatherings, the MANA 2020 organizers and the Board have decided to make MANA 2020 a virtual event. We have an exciting lineup of invited speakers, and we will strive to make the experience as interactive and rewarding as possible.
Plenary Speakers
University of Michigan, Medical School
Talk Title
"Leveraging metabolomics to understand clinical phenotypes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease."
Bio
Wassim Labaki, MD, MS is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and the Medical Director of the Lung Volume Reduction Program at the University of Michigan. He earned his medical degree from Georgetown University, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and his fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Michigan. He conducts clinical and translational research in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), including its epidemiology, natural history, chest imaging biomarkers, and more recently metabolomics. In 2019, Dr. Labaki was the recipient of the Sreedhar Nair Early Stage Investigator Award in COPD from the American Thoracic Society. He sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the COPD Foundation and is an active member of the American Thoracic Society, European Respiratory Society and the Metabolomics Association of North America.
Associate Professor and Alberta Innovates Translational Health Chair in Metabolomics
Talk Title
"Reducing the global burden of infectious diseases through precision infection management (PIM)."
Bio
Dr. Ian Lewis is an associate professor and Alberta Innovates – Health Solutions Translational Health Chair in Metabolomics in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. Lewis earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed his postdoctoral training at Princeton University. He was recruited by UCalgary to launch a research program that harnesses state-of-the-art technology to detect and combat infectious diseases. As a part of this program, Lewis built the Calgary Metabolomics Research Facility (CMRF), an analytical lab that specializes in unravelling the complex host-pathogen metabolic interactions that occur during infections. Recently, he partnered with Alberta Precision Laboratories (formerly Calgary Laboratory Services [CLS]) to launch a suite of new diagnostic tools and treatment practices that may significantly reduce the number of people who die from infections.
Professor, Department of Chemistry & Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomic, Princeton University
Talk Title
"Energy Metabolism."
Bio
Joshua Rabinowitz is a Professor of Chemistry & Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. He brings a quantitative, chemical perspective to the study of diet and metabolism. His research focuses on two broad questions: What is the quantitative flow (flux) through different metabolic pathways? How is this flux controlled? To address these questions, his lab develops innovative technologies that blend mass spectrometry, isotope tracers, and computational data integration. These technologies have been broadly applied to address major biomedical problems, including diabetes, infectious disease, and cancer. In the field of oncology, Dr. Rabinowitz contributed to the discovery of the cancer-causing metabolite, 2-hydroxyglutarate. More recently, his work found that lactate, classically considered a waste product, is actual a major circulating fuel.
Prior to Princeton University, Dr. Rabinowitz led R & D efforts at Alexza Pharmaceuticals where he invented the first thermal aerosol drug delivery product, the Adasuve inhaler, approved by the FDA for rapid treatment of agitation. Dr. Rabinowitz received both his Ph.D. in Biophysics followed by his M.D. from Stanford University.
Prof. and Director, Gelman Professorship Harvard Medical School
Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury
Professor of Oral Medicine, Infection and Immunity, HSMD
Talk Title
"Inflammation Resolution Mediators and Mechanisms via Functional Metabololipidomics."
Bio
Charles is the Simon Gelman Professor of Anaesthesia (Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology) at Harvard Medical School and also Professor of Oral Medicine, Infection and Immunity at Harvard School of Dental Medicine; He is Director of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Charles received a BS in biochemistry from Stony Brook University followed by a Doctorate in experimental pathology and medical sciences from New York University School of Medicine. He was a visiting scientist and postdoctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm with Professor Bengt Samuelsson (Nobel Laurate Medicine 82). In 1987, he joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School and in 1996 received an honorary degree from Harvard University.
Charles has led several multidisciplinary research teams as PI/PD for Program Project Grants supported by NIH and is currently PI/PD of the Program Project entitled “Resolution Mechanisms in Acute Inflammation: Resolution Pharmacology” (P01-GM095467). He has received several research awards including an NIH MERIT and several international awards among these are the 2008 William Harvey Outstanding Scientist Medal and AAAS Fellow in 2011. In 2010, he received the SLB Bonazinga Award, The American College of Rheumatology Hench (Nobel Laurate) Award Lecture in 2011 presented by the Mayo Clinic Hench Society. In 2016, he received the Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine. Charles received the International Eicosanoid Research Foundation’s 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Society of Investigative Pathology 2018 Rous Whipple Award and the 2018 Gaddum International Prize and Award Lecture from the British Pharmacology Society. His h-index is 157 with citations: > 83,000 http://serhanlab.bwh.harvard.edu/
Director, Genitourinary Malignancies Research Center
Kendrick Family Endowed Chair for Prostate Cancer Research
Cleveland Clinic
Co-Leader, Genitourinary Malignancies Program, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center
Talk Title
"Steroid metabolism in prostate cancer and human physiology."
Bio
Nima Sharifi, M.D is the Kendrick Family Endowed Chair for Prostate Cancer Research and Director of the Genitourinary Malignancies Research Center at Cleveland Clinic. His laboratory and translational research is focused on the discovery and clinical implications of new mechanisms of hormone therapy resistance. He is the recipient of the Top 10 Clinical Research Achievement Award of the Clinical Research Forum, AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research, the Richard Weitzman Award of the Endocrine Society, and is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an elected member of the Association of American Physicians.
Dr. Sharifi’s research group discovered that prostate cancer becomes resistant to androgen deprivation therapies using a mutation that allows tumors to make their own testosterone – effectively enabling cancers to feed themselves. He also showed that men who have this mutation have tumors that progress on treatment more quickly and that this impacts on survival. Currently, he is working on developing new and more effective therapies to personal treatment for men with prostate cancer.
Amy Simms, PhD
Biomedical Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Talk Title
"Systems biology approaches to elucidate the human host responses to coronaviruses"
Bio
Amy Sims, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist in the Chemical and Biological Signatures Division of the National Security Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, WA. She earned her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and worked with Professor Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) during her postdoctoral studies.
Dr. Sims spent an additional 15 years at UNC as faculty in a continued collaboration with Dr. Baric to understand the pathogenesis of highly pathogenic human coronaviruses and to identify novel vaccination strategies and therapeutic targets. Dr. Sims has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications on antivirals that are efficacious against human coronaviruses, using reverse genetic platforms to characterize coronavirus protein functions, and how coronaviruses prevent transcription factor nuclear translocation to regulate host gene expression, and recently joined PNNL to continue a decade long collaboration on the use of computational modeling and bioinformatics approaches in analyses of kinetic ‘omics data from studies of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2003 (SARS-CoV 2003) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infected samples.
The overall goal of her research is to understand the detailed molecular mechanisms by which CoVs manipulate host pathways and processes to evade the innate immune response and to enhance viral replication and spread.