Pre-Conference Workshop Day

Workshop A | 09.00 – 11.00

Best Practices of Culturing 3D Tissue Models from Organoids To Organ-On-A-Chip For Advanced Drug Discovery

  • Anastasia Korolj Chemical & Biomedical Engineer, Harvard medical school/Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Louise Ramos Scientist, Rakovina Therapeutics, Inc.
  • Manti guha principal Investigator and CIVM Lead, Incyte Corporation

Synopsis

The 3D modelling field has grown substantially in the past few years, with many different model types gaining considerable interest to support drug discovery and development efforts. Organoids have quickly become a mainstay for in vitro workflows; however, they have their limitations that need to be addressed to better support disease progression studies and drug development. Newer models including the organ-on-a-chip are coming to the fore to overcome some of these limitations, albeit having their own when it comes to cost and ease of culturing without prior experience.

Join this workshop to arm yourself with the knowledge and tools to:

• Incorporate hydrogels and add more complexity into your model system to support disease progression studies

• Uncover effective troubleshooting strategies to address common challenges in organoid/organ-on-a-chip culturing

• Understand quality control measures to ensure reproducibility and reliability in your in-house organoid/organ-on-a-chip experiments

11:00 am Lunch Break & Networking

Workshop B | 12.00 – 2.00

Uncovering Methods to Support High-Throughput Screening

  • Tim Spicer Director of HTS & Discovery Biology, The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology

Synopsis

As models gain more complexity, it gets increasingly difficult to ensure they are capable of high-throughput screening for therapeutics discovery while also ensuring they can be scaled-up largely to support drug development efforts.

Join this workshop to learn how to:

• Identify and overcome common challenges encountered when scaling up 3D tissue models for high-throughput screening

• Strategize practical methods for performing high-throughput screening with 3D tissue models across multiple compounds

• Understand experimental design considerations, automation technologies, and data analysis approaches that enhance the efficiency and throughput of compound screening using diverse 3D tissue models

2:00 pm Afternoon Break & Networking

Workshop C | 3.00 – 5.00

Safeguarding Model Replicability to Ensure Efficient Scaling Up of Models

Synopsis

Biopharma’s goal is to ensure that any lead candidates that they deem to be the best should move along the pre clinical discovery pipeline and into patients. To further that goal, this workshop focuses on the critical aspect of safeguarding replicability in 3D tissue models to ensure a seamless and efficient scaling-up process in drug discovery and development in the most cost-effective way.

Leaders will empower you to:

• Understand key parameters, such as cell sourcing, culture conditions, and validation protocols, that lay the groundwork for consistent and reproducible results

• Identify common challenges encountered in maintaining replicability across diverse 3D tissue models

• Uncover strategies for seamlessly integrating replicability considerations into the scaling-up process of 3D tissue models