3rd Annual Pandemic Preparedness Symposium

How can we be better prepared with antiviral drugs for the next pandemic? This event discusses the significant progress that has been recently achieved by industry and academia to create readily available drugs for viruses most likely to drive the next global pandemic. Although vaccines for COVID-19 were developed with unprecedented speed in 2020, vaccine development won't be fast enough in case of another pandemic caused by a yet unknown virus. Pan-antiviral drugs could serve as primary tools for quickly combating viral infection. And unlike most vaccines, they can be rapidly distributed without refrigeration and at modest cost.

8:15 a.m. - Registration and coffee

9:00 a.m. - Welcome by Sumit Chanda, PhD, Professor, Department of Immunology and Microbiology Scripps Research, and video message from Representative Scott Peters (US District 50)

9:15 a.m. - From Pandemic Response to Preparedness: What Have we Learned? by Isabel Najera, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, Anti-Infectives Research Unit, Pfizer

9:45 a.m. - Towards Perpetual Readiness – Delivering Medicines during Pandemic by Taiyin Yang, PhD, Former Executive Vice President, Pharmaceutical Development & Manufacturing, Gilead Sciences, Inc.

10:15 a.m. - Host-Focused Approaches to Studying Pandemic Viruses Pandemic by Angela Rasmussen, PhD, Principal Research Scientist, Vaccine and Infectious Organization (VIDO), University of Saskatchewan

10.45 a.m. - Break

11:15 a.m. - Cross-species coronavirus polymerase structural virology by Rob Kirchdoerfer, PhD, Assistant Professor, Institute for Molecular Virology, the Center for Quantitative Cell Imaging and the Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin

11:45 a.m. - Lunch break

1.00 p.m. - Antiviral development for the polio endgame: strategies, challenges, and future outlook by Rachel Burke, PhD, Senior Program Officer, Polio Global Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

1:30 p.m. - Opportunities for sub-stoichiometric inhibition and drug-resistance suppression in antiviral compounds by Karla Kirkegaard, PhD, Violetta L. Horton Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

2:00 p.m. - TBD by Dan Barouch, PhD, William Bosworth Castle Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

2:30 p.m. - Conserved Region T-cell Vaccine Approaches to Protect Against Highly Diverse Viruses by Bette Korber, PhD, Consultant, New Mexico Consortium

3:00 p.m. - The identification and validation of conserved T cell Epitope regions in Viral Pathogen Families with Pandemic Potential by Alessandro Sette, Dr. Biol. Sci., Professor and Member; Co-Director LJI Center for Vaccine Innovation

3:30 p.m. - Speaker Panel Discussion hosted by Arnab Chatterjee, PhD, Calibr-Skaggs Institute for Innovative Medicines, and Sumit Chanda, PhD, Scripps Research

4:00 p.m. - Oral poster presentations

5:00 p.m. - Event concludes

Event Venue

Sanford Consortium, 2880 Torrey Pines Scenic Drive, San Diego, United States