Thanks for another great ExoFest!
The team at SBI would like to thank everyone who attended last week's 2nd Annual Bay Area Exosome Research Festival, aka ExoFest, for another successful event!
For those of you unfamiliar with ExoFest, we held our first event last year to give Bay Area scientists an opportunity to get together and geek-out about discuss extracellular vesicles (EVs). It's one of the many ways SBI supports the exosome/EV research community outside of our products and services, and we hope the symposium fosters productive discussions and interactions for Bay Area scientists at all stages of their careers. We had such a great time at last year's ExoFest that we repeated the event this year on June 6, and are looking forward to next year's edition.
This year's symposium was co-organized by System Biosciences (SBI), Dr. Lynn Pulliam, UCSF, and Dr. Sharanjot Saini, UCSF, and held at UCSF in Mission Bay. We were very excited to bring in speakers from as far away as Oregon, Oklahoma, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia, in addition to California-based researchers. We would like to extend a special thanks to our keynote speakers Dr. Fatah Kashanchi, George Mason University, and Dr. Ken Witwer, Johns Hopkins University, and a congratulations to UCSF graduate student Tina Solvik, our short talk grand prize winner, and Dr. Pooja Bhardwaj, UCSF, our short talk runner up winner.
Here's a look at this year's talks:
ExoFest 2019 Talks
| Fatah Kashanchi | George Mason University | KEYNOTE: Virosome: Cross talk between viral infection and exosomes |
|---|---|---|
| Ken Witwer | Johns Hopkins University | KEYNOTE: Can we separate and characterize EVs from brain tissue? |
| Bing Sun | University of California, San Francisco | Neuron-derived exosomes identify cognitive impairment and gender differences in HIV |
| Ursula Sandau | Oregon Health & Science University | Methamphetamine Use Disorder Alters Plasma Extracellular Vesicle Characteristics and MicroRNA Expression |
| Pooja Bhardwaj | Vitalant Research Institute | Surface engineering of exosomes to block HIV infection |
| Philip Norris | University of California, San Francisco | Influence of EV cell of origin on immunological activity |
| Weina Ke | University of North Carolina | Dynamic RNA and DNA nanoassemblies with controlled immunological properties |
| Tina Solvik | University of California, San Francisco | Lysosomal block induces secretion of undigested autophagy cargo receptors |
| Connor O’Brien | Stanford University | Microvesicles Rescue Patient-Specific iPSC-Derived Cardiomyocytes from Doxorubicin Injury |
| Utkan Dimirci | Stanford University | Innovative tools to isolate extracellular vesicles for broad applications in liquid biopsy and cardiovascular research |
| Fengmei Pi | ExonanoRNA | RNA Nanotechnology to display ligand on extracellular vesicles for cancer regression |
| Katrin Svensson | Stanford University | Blood-based diagnostics for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease |
| Tomoko Obara | University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center | Extracellular vesicles from human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells repair organ damages caused by cadmium poisoning in a medaka model |
| Mauro Poggio | University of California, San Francisco | Exosomal PD-L1: a potential novel target for cancer immunotherapy |
| Sharanjot Saini | University of California, San Francisco | Novel markers for advanced prostate cancer |
| Tatu Rojalin | University of California, Davis | Hybrid plasmonic biomaterial nanofilter scaffold for cancer EV diagnostics based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) |
Thank you again, exosome and EV researchers, for making ExoFest 2019 such a success! And be on the lookout in early 2020 for announcements about the 3rd annual ExoFest.
