Keystone Symposia Launches 2014-2015 Meeting Series with Global Health Vaccines Conference in Seattle

SILVERTHORNE, Colo., Sept. 30, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Keystone Symposia will convene the first conference of its 2014-2015 season and the first in its 2014-15 Global Health Series – on "The Modes of Action of Vaccine Adjuvants" at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel – immediately following the conclusion of the Grand Challenges Meeting for that program's grantees. The four-day conference is part of the Keystone Symposia Global Health Series, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has also funded travel awards for 36 investigators from developing countries to attend.

Scientific organizers of the meeting are Drs. Philippa C. Marrack of HHMI/National Jewish Health, Steven Reed of the Infectious Disease Research Institute and Robert A. Seder of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

The meeting will convene in the afternoon of October 8 with a panel discussion, held jointly with the Grand Challenges Meeting at the Seattle Westin, featuring Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health; Arunachalam Muruganantham, Founder of Jayaashree Industries, and Amy Smith, Founder of D-Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Subsequent days of the four-day conference will feature plenary sessions, workshops and poster sessions with presentations by speakers such as Bali Pulendran of Emory University, Gary J. Nabel of Sanofi, Jean-Laurent Casanova of Rockefeller University, Anja Seubert of Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics, Robert L. Coffman of Dynavax Technologies, Ross M. Kedl of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and Jenny P.Y. Ting of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sessions will explore how to make more effective adjuvants for vaccines for both infectious diseases and cancer.

"With the crisis of Ebola and newly emerging respiratory viruses worldwide, there has never been a more critical time to accelerate the development of new vaccines. The identification and implementation of more effective adjuvants is a critical component in this effort," said Dr. Philippa Marrack, the lead scientific organizer of the conference.

Beginning in 2006, Keystone Symposia has received grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund meetings in the Keystone Symposia Global Health Series. The other 2014-2015 season Keystone Symposia Global Health meetings are a conference on Host Response in Tuberculosis in January 2015 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA to be held jointly with one on granulomas, another on Co-Infection: A Global Challenge for Disease Control in Ouro Preto, Brazil in March 2015, HIV Vaccines in Banff, Alberta, Canada in March 2015 to be held jointly with a B cells conference, and Mechanisms of HIV Persistence in April 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

About Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology

Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, has been conducting internationally renowned, open scientific conferences since its founding as UCLA Symposia in 1972 and has been headquartered in Summit County, Colorado since 1990.

It will convene 57 conferences in the 2014-2015 season, the majority of which will take place between January and April 2015, on topics ranging from cancer and immunology to neuroscience and genomics. Registration fees are supplemented by generous monetary support from corporate, foundation and individual donors as well as government grants.

More information on the vaccines conference can be found at www.keystonesymposia.org/14S1 and on the organization and its meetings at www.keystonesymposia.org and www.keystonesymposia.org/meetings, respectively.

Yvonne M. Psaila
Director of Marketing & Communications
Keystone Symposia on Molecular & Cellular Biology
+ 1 970-262-2676
[email protected]

SOURCE Keystone Symposia