2023

IPI Surfacing

An IPI symposium on cell surface receptor biology and protein science

Thursday, June 15, 2023, 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Joseph B. Martin Conference Center
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA, 02115

Register for free

Join us for IPI Surfacing

  • Talks by world-class experts on cell surface signaling pathways
  • Panel discussion on the promise of synthetic antibodies and challenges to universal access
  • Posters presented by emerging biomedical researchers
  • Networking lunch and reception

IPI Surfacing is a free, one-day event focused on cell surface receptor biology and protein science. As a catalyst in protein science, IPI is thrilled to convene scientific leaders to amplify conversations at the forefront of bioscience.

Register

Event sponsors:

Logo for Morphic Therapeutic
Logo for Tectonic Therapeutic
Logo for Seismic Therapeutic
Logo for Vida Ventures

Speakers

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Stanford University

Christopher Garcia
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University of Oxford

Yvonne Jones
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Harvard Medical School

Debora Marks
University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun
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Osaka University

Junichi Takagi
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Stanford University

Christopher Garcia

K. Christopher Garcia, Ph.D., is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and of structural biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The Garcia laboratory investigates structural and functional aspects of cell surface receptor recognition and activation in receptor-ligand systems. The lab uses structural information on receptor-ligand complexes to engineer variant proteins and surrogates to manipulate receptor signaling and cellular function, with an eye towards therapeutic applications.

Garcia has founded or co-founded several biotech companies, including Synthekine, Surrozen, 3T Biosciences and ALX Oncology, that are attempting to clinically develop technologies from his lab. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2016.

Headshot of woman smiling in front of bookshelves

University of Oxford

Yvonne Jones

Yvonne Jones, Ph.D., holds the Sir Andrew McMichael Professorship of Structural Immunology at the University of Oxford. Her research group investigates human cell signaling mechanisms and has provided fundamental insights into signaling systems important to cellular immunology, developmental biology and cancer.

Jones completed her doctorate at Oxford’s Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics and learned protein crystallography during her postdoctoral training. In 1989, she reported the three-dimensional structure of tumor necrosis factor, which launched her interest in cell signaling.

She co-founded the Division of Structural Biology (STRUBI) at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine (NDM) in 1999 and was a Cancer Research UK Principal Research Fellow from 2001-2011. Currently, she is the co-head of STRUBI, the deputy head of the NDM, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and a fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Learned Society of Wales.

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Harvard Medical School

Debora Marks

Debora Marks, Ph.D., is a world-leading computational biologist with a focus on developing new artificial intelligence methods to accelerate biotherapeutic discovery. Currently, she is an associate professor of systems biology at Harvard University, focused on viral genome forecasting and immune response.

Marks received the International Society for Computational Biology Overton Prize for outstanding accomplishment in the field of computational biology in 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award in the Neurodegeneration Challenge Design in 2018 and an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award for antibody design in 2020.

University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun

Andreas Plückthun, Ph.D., has been a professor of biochemistry at the University of Zürich since 1993. His interdisciplinary protein engineering lab has made important contributions in antibody engineering, scaffold engineering, directed evolution, GPCR engineering and targeted gene delivery.

Plückthun developed the first antibody expression in E. coli and the first fully synthetic antibody library. He’s developed repeat proteins as alternative scaffolds; ribosome display as an in vitro protein evolution method; directed evolution methods for stabilizing GPCRs; and a system of virus-like particles to deliver DNA to selected cells in the body.

He has been an inventor on more than 25 patent families and is co-founder of four companies: Morphosys AG, Molecular Partners AG, G7 Therapeutics and Vector BioPharma. He has written over 500 publications which have been cited over 50,000 times and received numerous awards, including the 2016 Christian-Anfinsen Award of the Protein Society.

Photo of man in glasses.

Osaka University

Junichi Takagi

Junichi Takagi, Ph.D. is a professor in the Laboratory for Protein Synthesis and Expression at the Institute for Protein Research of Osaka University, Japan. His research interest concerns structural and functional analyses on receptor-ligand interactions, particularly in the field of immunology and neuroscience.

Takagi’s expertise is in the structural study of receptor ectodomains and extracellular proteins using both X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. He has conducted numerous studies aimed at elucidating the mechanisms of cell signaling by using structural information. Additionally, he is also engaged in technology developments related to high-quality protein production and purification, as well as structure-based protein and antibody engineering.

Panel

The promise of synthetic antibodies and the challenges to universal access

Panel host:

Ken Fasman, IPI president and CEO

A discussion on the biomedical applications of synthetic antibodies, barriers to competing with animal-derived antibodies and universal access to quality protein tools within the research community.

Panel speakers:

Alloy Therapeutics

Errik Anderson
A headshot of a man
University of Toronto & SGC

Aled Edwards
Harvard Medical School

Andrew Kruse
Institute for Protein Innovation

Rob Meijers
University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun
Woman smiling in Addgene t-shirt.
Addgene

Meghan Rego

Alloy Therapeutics

Errik Anderson

Errik Anderson, MBA, is a bioengineer, entrepreneur and investor who has launched seven venture-backed biotech companies in the last 20 years, including Alloy Therapeutics, Adimab, Compass Therapeutics, Alector, Arsanis and Avitide.

Anderson first worked in venture capital at Lehman Brothers Venture Capital and in marketing at Bristol-Myers Squibb. After earning his bachelor’s degree in economics at Dartmouth College, he studied bioengineering and business as a graduate student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering and the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration. He graduated as a Tuck Scholar for outstanding academic achievement and is currently a member of Tuck’s board of advisors.

Currently, Anderson is CEO of Alloy Therapeutics and the founder and CEO of Ulysses Diversified Holdings, which supports entrepreneurs building companies that make the world a better place. Anderson has also worked with and invested in teams in tech, fintech, consumer, software, alternative energy, health IT and health care services.

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University of Toronto & SGC

Aled Edwards

Aled Edwards, Ph.D., founded and leads the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a public-private partnership in the biomedical research and pharmaceutical sector. The SGC generates research tools and knowledge to support basic science and early-stage drug discovery. Since 2004, the SGC has placed all its research output into the public domain without restriction, including without patents as a core principle. The SGC founded the YCharOS project, which is an open science reagent antibody characterization public-private partnership.

Edwards is also a professor and the Temerty Nexus Chair of Health Innovation and Technology at the University of Toronto. He has published over 200 papers and his teams have contributed over 4,500 structures to the Protein Data Bank as of 2021.

Harvard Medical School

Andrew Kruse

Andrew Kruse, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His lab is focused on the study of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and other transmembrane proteins. His team uses synthetic camelid antibodies, or nanobodies, as tools to study transmembrane signaling and has developed a nanobody library, now available for nonprofit research from Kerafast.

Alongside Timothy Springer, Kruse co-founded IPI in 2017 and Tectonic Therapeutic, three years later. He now serves on Tectonic’s board of directors.

Kruse earned his Ph.D. in structural biology under Brian Kobilka at Stanford University. He received an Amgen Young Investigator Award in 2019 and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017 for impactful early-career research.

Institute for Protein Innovation

Rob Meijers

Rob Meijers, Ph.D., is director of the Antibody Platform at IPI, which develops synthetic recombinant antibodies using a yeast display platform. Since his arrival at IPI in 2019, Meijers has streamlined and scaled the Institute’s platform for distribution in late 2023.

Meijers completed his Ph.D. at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) before studying immune cell surface receptors as a postdoctoral fellow under Jia-huai Wang at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He then spent a decade as a group leader at the EMBL, studying cell surface receptor-ligand interactions involved in immune recognition and neuronal migration, including netrin and its receptors.

Now, Meijers is developing synthetic antibodies for neuronal receptor families to study neuronal migration.

University of Zurich

Andreas Plückthun

Andreas Plückthun, Ph.D., has been a professor of biochemistry at the University of Zürich since 1993. His interdisciplinary protein engineering lab has made important contributions in antibody engineering, scaffold engineering, directed evolution, GPCR engineering and targeted gene delivery.

Plückthun developed the first antibody expression in E. coli and the first fully synthetic antibody library. He’s developed repeat proteins as alternative scaffolds; ribosome display as an in vitro protein evolution method; directed evolution methods for stabilizing GPCRs; and a system of virus-like particles to deliver DNA to selected cells in the body.

He has been an inventor on more than 25 patent families and is co-founder of four companies: Morphosys AG, Molecular Partners AG, G7 Therapeutics and Vector BioPharma. He has written over 500 publications which have been cited over 50,000 times and received numerous awards, including the 2016 Christian-Anfinsen Award of the Protein Society.

Woman smiling in Addgene t-shirt.

Addgene

Meghan Rego

Meghan Rego, Ph.D., is the director of antibodies at Addgene. She oversees Addgene’s recombinant antibody production and quality control platform and is excited to bring high quality, open-access antibodies to scientists worldwide. Rego completed her doctorate at the University of Rhode Island, where she studied the molecular etiology of Fanconi anemia, a cancer susceptibility syndrome.

She worked at a variety of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies focused on therapeutic biologics, including Novartis and Excelimmune, Inc. In 2016, she joined Addgene to help launch their viral vector service.

IPI Surfacing schedule

Thursday, June 15, 2023

8:15 a.m. Registration and light breakfast

9 a.m. Welcome remarks: Kenneth Fasman, IPI president and CEO

9:15 a.m. Yvonne Jones: Some structural stories from the cell surface

10 a.m. Coffee break

10:30 a.m. Andreas Plückthun: Forcing actions on surface receptors by engineered binding molecules

11:15 a.m. Junichi Takagi: The “Lasso-grafted” Fc design platform offers creation of novel receptor agonists and antagonists

12 p.m. Lunch and poster session

1:30 p.m. Debora Marks: Machine learning protein design for antibody discovery

2:15 p.m. Panel discussion: Promise of synthetic antibodies and challenges to universal access

3:15 p.m. Coffee break

3:45 p.m. Christopher Garcia: Modulating cell physiology through ligand-receptor engineering

4:30 p.m. Closing remarks: Tim Springer

5 p.m. Reception and poster session

Registration

IPI Surfacing is a free event. We encourage attendees to register in advance. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

If you register but can no longer attend IPI Surfacing, please let us know so we can make the seat available to others.

Registration closes on May 31, 2023.

Register

Call for poster abstracts

The IPI Surfacing poster session is an opportunity for researchers to showcase work on cell surface receptor biology and network with speakers and panelists.

Poster submission is now closed.

The IPI team is currently reviewing abstracts and will notify researchers of accepted posters by May 15, 2023.

Questions? Email us here

FAQ

IPI Surfacing is a free event. However, space is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Early registration is encouraged.
The conference will take place at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center on the ground floor of the New Research Building at Harvard Medical School, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston MA, 02115.
As street parking and garage space is limited in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, IPI encourages attendees to make use of public transportation. The Joseph B. Martin Conference Center is easily accessible via the MBTA using bus routes, the Green Line or the commuter rail. Bicycle parking is also available.
IPI Surfacing is an in-person event and will not be livestreamed.
IPI Surfacing will adhere to all COVID-19 safety precautions in use by the Harvard University venue during summer 2023. Vaccination and testing are recommended prior to attending. Mask wearing is optional.
Preference will be given to students, postdoctoral researchers, fellows and junior faculty presenting research using state-of-the-art antibody technology for cell surface receptor biology. Abstracts advertising products will not be considered.
For more details on IPI Surfacing, contact us at info@proteininnovation.org or sign up for our mailing list to keep in touch.

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