Lighting up Neurobiology with Antibodies

Vision Institute & Lyon University

Alain Chédotal (Keynote)

Alain Chédotal, Ph.D. is a researcher at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and group leader at the Vision Institute in Paris. He is also a professor at Lyon University and Hospital. 

Chédotal received his Ph.D. from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. His lab studies nervous system development and evolution. Chédotal has pioneered the use of tissue-clearing methods and light sheet microscopy to study embryogenesis. He is the coordinator of the Human Developmental Cell Atlas (HuDeCA) consortium, a state-of-the-art Inserm interdisciplinary program with the goal to build an atlas of embryonic and fetal human cells.

Yale School of Medicine

Thomas Biederer

Thomas Biederer, Ph.D. is an associate professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine. 

Following postdoctoral training at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center with Thomas Südhof, Biederer became a faculty member at Yale in 2003, joined the Tufts University School of Medicine in 2013, then returned to Yale in 2019. In addition to his Yale lab, he leads a team at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts to investigate the effects of bioactive compounds on synapse maintenance. His research addresses three questions: How do trans-synaptic protein complexes assemble synapses? How are the properties of synapses acutely instructed? And what makes synapses vulnerable — and resilient — to loss in human neurodegenerative disorders? To address these questions, the Biederer group combines molecular studies, such as single-particle tracking and proteomics, with analyses of synaptic connectivity in the cortex and hippocampus in mouse models.

Harvard Medical School & Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Chenghua Gu

Chenghua Gu, D.V.M., Ph.D. is a professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). 

Gu studies interactions between the nervous system and vasculature, including the blood-brain barrier and neurovascular coupling.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School

Francisco Quintana

Francisco J. Quintana, Ph.D. is a professor of neurology and the Kuchroo Weiner Distinguished Professor of Neuroimmunology at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is also an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Quintana is president of the International Society of Neuroimmunology (ISNI). 

Quintana studies neuroimmunology, investigating signaling pathways that control inflammation and neurodegeneration, with the ultimate goal of identifying novel therapeutic targets for immune-mediated and neurodegenerative disorders. His work has identified the transcription factor AHR as an important regulator of inflammation driven by adaptive and innate immune cells; defined mechanisms by which cell-cell interactions, metabolism, the microbiome and environmental chemicals control inflammation and neurodegeneration; and guided the development of tapinarof, the first FDA-approved AHR-targeting drug for the treatment of psoriasis.

University of California Davis School of Medicine

James Trimmer

James Trimmer, Ph.D. is a distinguished professor of physiology and membrane biology at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, and founding director of the nonprofit UC Davis/NIH NeuroMab Facility.

Trimmer’s research focuses on the expression, localization and function of neuronal ion channel complexes at the proteomic level, and on the generation, validation and use of renewable and recombinant antibodies in diverse neuroscience research applications. 

At NeuroMab, Trimmer and his colleagues generate high-quality, low-cost monoclonal antibodies for neuroscience research. Trimmer’s current efforts focus on generating a publicly available database of antibody sequences from high-throughput sequencing of his extensive hybridoma collection; generation and open-access dissemination of recombinant versions of NeuroMabs as IgGs and scFvs; and development of camelid nanobodies for neuroscience research.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School

Humsa Venkatesh

Humsa Venkatesh, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 

Venkatesh studies the reciprocal interactions between the nervous system and cancers. Her work emphasizes the electrical components of tumor pathophysiology and highlights the extent to which neural activity controls and facilitates disease progression. The understanding of these co-opting mechanisms has led to novel strategies to broadly treat cancers by disabling their ability to electrically integrate into neural circuitry. Venkatesh’s pioneering research in this emerging field of cancer neuroscience aims to harness the systems level microenvironmental dependencies of tumor growth to develop innovative therapeutic treatments.