Virtual Meeting
16 June 2021
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are planning a short, virtual Ion Channel Modulation Symposium this year.
ICMS gathers a broad range of people from academia, CROs and pharmaceutical companies to discuss the science of ion channel modulation. Sophion initiated the meeting due to the absence of a high-level ion channel drug discovery conference in Europe.
Under normal circumstances, the symposium provides around 22 speakers with an audience of 130 and has been fully attended in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Unfortunately, the symposium was cancelled in 2020 and again in 2021 due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
See the talks for the virtual ICMS here.
Speakers
Professor Saverio Gentile
Dr Saverio Gentile is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He is interested in understanding the role of ion channels in cancer biology. Dr Gentile’s group has brought to light several important functions regarding potassium channels activity that control a variety of cancer markers, including proliferation, metastasis and metabolism. These works have also revealed that potassium channels can be pharmacologically targeted to develop a safe and efficient therapeutic strategy against currently untreatable breast or ovarian cancers.
Professor Sara Liin
Sara Liin is an associate professor at Linköping University. Sara graduated from the Linköping University in Sweden in 2011, where she did her PhD under Fredrik Elinder. She was a visiting postdoc in the groups of Peter Larsson at the University of Miami in the USA and Erik Lindahl at SciLifeLab in Sweden. In 2016 she established her independent research lab at the Linköping University. Her fundamental research team is fascinated by the electric activity of the body. Specifically, her group uses electrophysiology techniques and computational approaches to study molecular aspects of voltage-gated potassium ion channels implicated in disorders like cardiac arrhythmia and epilepsy. The overarching aim of the research is to understand how inherited mutations in ion channels cause disease and how to develop new approaches to restore ion channel function. Her recent work suggests that specific lipid molecules have antiarrhythmic and antiepileptic effects by targeting such potassium channels. The group is currently interested in how endogenous molecules like endocannabinoids tune the function of potassium channels of the heart, which hopefully will further the understanding of factors that dictate arrhythmia risk and severity.
Professor Bernard Attali
Bernard Attali was educated in France, graduated in Physical Chemistry, and received a Pharm.D from Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse). After immigrating to Israel, he received a PhD in Neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Bernard Attali is a Full Professor at the Sackler Medical School in Tel Aviv University, where his research aims at elucidating the structural, biophysical and physiological attributes of potassium channels. Bernard Attali contributed to the characterization of Kv7 potassium channels, whose mutations in humans lead to cardiac arrhythmias, epilepsy or autism disorders. He has published so far more than 110 papers in peer-reviewed international journals.
Dr Ruth Murrell-Lagnado
Ruth Murrell-Lagnado studied Pharmacology at University College London. She then moved to Cambridge to pursue a PhD in the Physiological Laboratory, working with Denis Haydon on the mechanism of action of general anaesthetics on ion channels. She continued her training as a post-doctoral fellow, first at Oxford University with Aviva Tolkovsky. In the early ’90s, she moved to Stanford University to work with Rick Aldrich on the recently cloned Shaker potassium channel. In 1993, she returned to the UK for a lectureship in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge. In the early days, her main interest continued to be structure-function relationships within the potassium channel family. Still, since 2000 her research has mainly been to understand the structure, function and cell biology of the P2X-purinergic receptor family. A particular focus in recent years has been lysosomal P2X4 receptors and their role in disease. She has trained several PhD students and post-docs who have made their careers in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. In 2015 she joined the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex and was part of Sussex Neuroscience and the Sussex Drug Discovery Centre. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of General Physiology.
We reserve the right to turn down any registrant.