2019 Advanced 3D Human Models and High-Content Analysis Symposium

Jason Swedlow earned a BA in Chemistry from Brandeis University in 1982 and PhD in Biophysics from UCSF in 1994. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr T. J. Mitchison at UCSF and then Harvard Medical School, Dr Swedlow established his own laboratory in 1998 at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre, University of Dundee, as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow. He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2002 and named Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology in 2007. His lab focuses on studies of mitotic chromosome structure and dynamics and has published numerous leading papers in the field. He is co-founder of the Open Microscopy Environment (OME), a community-led open source software project that develops specifications and tools for biological imaging. In 2005, he founded Glencoe Software, Inc., a commercial start-up that provides commercial licenses and customization for OME software. In 2011, Prof Swedlow and the OME Consortium were named BBSRC's Social Innovator of the Year and Overall Innovator of the Year. In 2012, he was named Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Prof Swedlow has organized or directed several courses in quantitative microscopy at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, USA,
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA and the National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore. India.

My research aims to understand the signalling networks controlling cell shape and adhesion during normal development, and how these are altered in disease. To do this, my approach is to combine Drosophila (fruit fly) genetics and mammalian (human) systems to reveal the broad principles and mechanistic details of adhesion signalling, respectively.

I completed doctoral studies in 2015 at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia, where I described control of tissue growth, cell shape, and organ development by integrin adhesion signalling proteins in Drosophila. In 2018 I was awarded a Commonwealth Rutherford Fellowship to study cell shape and adhesion with Professor Chris Bakal, at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. In my work with Professor Bakal, we are combining high-throughput and high-content imaging to uncover adhesion signalling networks and use this information to improve targeted therapies in cancer.

Martin Jones works in the Electron Microscopy Science Technology Platform at the Francis Crick Institute in London, developing new hardware and software for extracting meaning from ever more complex datasets.

Martin's DPhil from Sussex University was in experimental atomic and quantum physics, followed by a postdoc in experimental quantum information processing. After this he moved to biology, joining the vascular biology lab at Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute, subsequently joining the EM team there.

Senior scientist at GSK specializing in developing novel assays for drug discovery and development using complex in vitro models and multi-parametric analysis.

Donna Davies has a PhD in Biochemistry and holds a Personal Chair at the University of Southampton, UK. She has pioneered the use of tissue engineering using airway tissue derived from volunteers with asthma or COPD as alternatives to using animal models of pulmonary disease. More recently, she has also developed novel in vitro models of lung fibrosis for development of novel anti-fibrotic agents. Notable discoveries include demonstration of epithelial dysfunction in asthma and COPD, dissection of the function of the asthma susceptibility gene, ADAM33, and involvement of the epithelial mesenchymal tropic unit in asthma pathogenesis. She co-founded the University spin-out company, Synairgen, which has developed inhaled interferon-beta (SNG001) as a novel treatment for asthma and COPD exacerbations.

Krisztian Koos is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the laboratory of Peter Horvath, Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He graduated as a computer scientist at the University of Szeged where he worked on computer tomography algorithms. His research interests lie in image processing and machine learning, and he is interested in developing algorithms to solve interesting problems from the life sciences. His main topic is label-free image processing using DIC microscopy. He developed an automatic electrophysiological measurement system that performs whole-cell patch-clamp recording in human brain tissues.

Arne Hansen received his MD at the University of Hamburg. After clinical training and a 3-year PostDoc at NIH he joined the Department for Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology at UKE/Hamburg in 2007 and was appointed as Assistant Professor in 2012 and Associate Professor in 2018. His research focus is the development of 3D cell culture models to study cardiomyocyte biology and disease. In this context, he has developed techniques to generate heart tissues from human CRISPR/Cas9 engineered iPSCs -and optimized test systems to analyze contractile force and calcium transients with high levels of automation.

Thierry Dorval received a B.S. degree in physic and graduated in image processing and artificial intelligence at Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris, France. He received a Ph.D.d then joined the Institut Pasteur Korea in 2005 first as researcher in biological image analysis then as a group leader specialized in High Content Screening applied to cellular differentiation as well as toxicity prediction.

In 2012 he joined AstraZeneca, UK. His activities were about developing and advising on quantitative image and data analysis solutions in support of high content phenotypic screens in addition to cellular and tissue imaging.

In 2015 he joined Servier, France, as leader of the High Content Screening group within CPCB CentEX. He is currently still working on phenotypic approaches to improve drug discovery pipeline using high content strategies and currently lead the Data Science Lab.

Gregory Vladimer is the CSO of Allcyte, a startup in Vienna, Austria. He received his PhD from UMass Medical School where he studied inflammation, and was a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at CeMM in Vienna. Together with the Department of Hematology of the MedUniWien, spearheaded the use of single-cell image-based screening for the personalized identification of treatments for hematological cancers through a prospective clinical trial, and several retrospective studies. His work is published in journals including Nature, Lancet-Hematology, NEJM, and Cell, and he is on the steering-committee for the precision haematology working group of EHA advocating for standards around functional testing.

Mario Saporta, MD, Ph.D., MBA is an assistant professor of Neurology and Human Genetics at the University of Miami. He is a clinical neurologist and translational scientist specialized in neuromuscular genetic diseases. His lab focuses on the use of patient-derived cell lines to model genetic neuropathies for mechanistic studies. He is particularly interested in the identification of axon phenotypes using novel tridimensional culture strategies to develop new, disease-relevant, drug screening platforms.

Hazel Screen is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chair of Bioengineering at Queen Mary University of London.

Her research group focuses on multi-scale structure-function behaviour and mechanobiology in tissues. She has particular interest in in vitro models to explore health and drivers of disease in musculoskeletal and cardiovascular tissues, using her mechanobiology expertise to develop models with more physiologically relevant physical environmental cues. She has authored ~100 peer-reviewed publications and several book chapters.

Prof Screen also directs the UK RI funded Organ on a Chip Technologies network, which aims to drive forward and support UK-wide research activity in the field.

PhD in reproductive tox, worked in pre-clinical pharma for 25 years in Hit ID, Hits to Lead, Target Biology sections developing cell based assays for compound screening. Founding entrepreneur of Aurelia Bioscience in 2012, delivering tailored assay development for compounds pharmacological profiling for screening purposes

"Dr. Souza is the Director of Global Business Development and Innovation, 3D Culture at Greiner Bio-One and former Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He is one of the creators of magnetic 3D cell culture, including magnetic 3D bioprinting. Results using these groundbreaking technologies have been reported in various high-impact scientific journals, including Nature Nanotechnology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Protocols, Biomaterials, and Nature Reviews Cancer. Recently, his work was selected for the Short List of The Lush Prize for outstanding research producing an effective non-animal safety test. Dr. Souza’s research has been funded by grants from National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DOD), Center for Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), and Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF)."