Lunaphore to host The Spatial Biology Week™ 2023 virtual meeting highlighting new avenues for discovery

LAUSANNE, Switzerland – September 4, 2023 – 4:00 pm (CEST) – Lunaphore, a Swiss life sciences company developing technology to enable spatial biology in every laboratory, today announced the third edition of The Spatial Biology Week™, taking place virtually October 2-6, 2023. The five-day meeting, which drew over 600 registrants from around the world last year, returns to host an international group of experts from industry and academia. The online format provides free access to the scientific community worldwide and presents an exclusive opportunity to interact directly with top-notch scientists and innovators.

Spatial biology supports scientists in addressing complex biological questions with a unique and comprehensive approach. The engaging talks and discussions planned around The Spatial Biology Week™ will explore a broad spectrum of topics from various research areas, showcasing the far-reaching and transformative impact of spatial biology.

“The biomedical research field has traditionally focused on a single gene or cell type, which is insufficient for understanding complex diseases such as cancer. Many diseases result from interactions among a diverse array of cells,” said Dr. Amy Heimberger, Jean Malnati Miller Professor of Neurological Surgery and Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University. “Spatial profiling allows us to interrogate cellular interactions in a wide variety of tissues and disease settings that will ultimately lead to therapeutics that are focused on reshaping those interactions.”

The sessions will cover multimodal approaches for spatial analysis, cutting-edge spatial biology research in neuroscience, real-world examples of spatial biology studies to identify clinically relevant biomarkers, novel end-to-end workflows to transform hyperplex images into biologically relevant insights, as well as success stories of technology adoption in the field of immunology, immuno-oncology, and beyond. Findings from these studies will potentially lead to the development of the next generation of personalized diagnostics and therapies.

Leaders of the field have welcomed the vision of The Spatial Biology Week™ as a means of fostering scientific collaboration and creating a stage that showcases spatial biology’s potential to support research, complement other methods, and ultimately find answers to hypotheses. The meeting will host three distinguished external Session Chairs with unparalleled expertise this year.

Confirmed Session Chairs¹:

Jared Burks, Ph.D.
Professor, Co-Director of the North Campus Flow Cytometry & Cellular Imaging Core Facility University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center 

Amy B Heimberger, MD, FAANS, Ph.D.
Jean Malnati Miller Professor of Neurological Surgery, Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University, Scientific Director of The Malnati Brain Tumor Institute, and the Interim Associate Director of Translational Research of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center (USA)

Denis Schapiro, Ph.D.
Group Leader, Institute for Computational Biomedicine and Institute of Pathology, University Hospital Heidelberg (Germany)

Confirmed external speakers¹:

Moran Amit, MD, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, MD Anderson Cancer Center (USA)

Idris Boudhabhay, MD
Senior Nephrologist, Ph.D. Student, Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, Unité INSERM, UMRS1138, Department of Nephrology and Kidney Transplantation, Necker Hospital (France)

Michaeline Bunting, Ph.D.
Sr. Director Product Management and Marketing, Bio-Techne (USA)

Michael DeCuypere MD, Ph.D.
Director of Translational Research and Clinical Trials in NeuroSurgery & Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago (USA)

Sami Farhi, Ph.D.
Director, Optical Profiling Platform, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (USA)

Sammy Ferri-Borgogno, Ph.D.
Instructor, MD Anderson Cancer Center (USA)

Monika Golinska, Ph.D.
Laboratory Manager, Bondiek’s lab, Cancer Research UK  (UK)

Bora Gurel, MD, Ph.D.
Clinician Scientist and Pathologist, The Institute of Cancer Research London (UK)

Kelly Hunter, M.Sc.
Chief Scientific Officer, Propath UK (UK)

James R. Mansfield
Senior Vice President, Visiopharm (Denmark)

Jimin Min, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, MD Anderson Cancer Center (USA)

Hinda Najem, MD, MS
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Northwestern University (USA)

Matthew Pugh, MD, Ph.D., FRCPath
Jean Shanks Pathsoc Intermediate Fellow, Associate Clinical Professor, University of Birmingham (UK)

David R. Raleigh, MD, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Robert and Ruth Halperin Endowed Chair in Meningioma Research, Brain Tumor Center Principal Investigator and Preclinical Therapeutics Core Director, Departments of Radiation Oncology, Neurological Surgery, and Pathology, University of California San Francisco (USA)

Albert Santamaria-Martínez, Ph.D.
Scientist, Cancer Genomics lab, Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (Switzerland)

Sheila Singh, MD, Ph.D., FRCSC
Pediatric Neurosurgeon, McMaster Children’s Hospital, Professor of Surgery,  Professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, Division Head, Neurosurgery, Hamilton Health Sciences, Director, Centre for Discovery in Cancer Research, McMaster University, Senior Canada Research Chair in Human Cancer Stem Cell Biology, University Scholar and Chair, McMaster College of Health Inventors (Canada)

Adam M. Sonabend Worthalter, MD Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Neurological Surgery, Northwestern University (USA)

Florian Wünnemann, Ph.D.
Postdoc, Institute for Computational Biomedicine and Institute of Pathology, University Hospital Heidelberg (Germany)

Catalina Lee-Chang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery, Northwestern University (USA)

Pedro Espinosa Gonzalez
Field Applications Scientist, EMEA, Indica Labs (USA)

Mauro Gwerder
Ph.D. Student, Institute of Tissue Medicine and Pathology, University of Bern (Switzerland)

 

To register and learn more about the event and the agenda, please visit: https://lunaphore.com/our-events/the-spatial-biology-week-2023/

To learn more about Lunaphore, please visit: www.lunaphore.com

 

Disclaimer:

¹ The participation in the event is the sole decision of the speakers. The presentations are based on their personal experience and do not imply any official endorsement by their institutions.

 

 

 

About Lunaphore

Lunaphore Technologies S.A. is a Swiss company born in 2014 with the vision of enabling spatial biology in every laboratory. Lunaphore provides solutions based on a game-changing chip technology that can extract spatial proteomic and transcriptomic data from tumors and other tissues, transforming any assay into multiplex spatial biology through a streamlined and easily integrated process. Lunaphore empowers researchers in immunology, immuno-oncology, and neuroscience to push the boundaries of scientific discovery and drug development. Lunaphore’s technology enables the identification of biomarker “signatures” with clinical relevance to support the development of diagnostic tools and streamline clinical trials, to ultimately improve patient outcomes. For further information on Lunaphore and its products, please visit https://lunaphore.com.

For further information contact:
Irene Tamayo
Lunaphore Corporate Communications
Email: [email protected]