This webinar series will feature biotech industry leaders, experts, and entrepreneurs discussing COVID-19 and its impact on innovation.
In our fourth panel, hear from experts on testing strategies as well as company leaders working on testing. They'll detail current efforts & hurdles to rapidly expand efforts.
Our panelists for this event include:
Michael Mina - Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Immunology & Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health
Michael Mina, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and the Department of Immunology & Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health and a clinical pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School. After earning his AB at Dartmouth College in engineering and public health, he completed his MD and PhD degrees in the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program at Emory University and subsequently completed post-doctoral work at Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical residency in clinical pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mina’s research focuses on the development of novel high-throughput technologies to advance infectious disease diagnostics and epidemiological surveillance, and understand interactions between pathogen exposures and immunity. His work has uncovered prolonged effects of measles infections to delete previously acquired immunity, and has linked measles vaccines to benefits towards reducing mortality by as much as 50% globally. More broadly, a major interest of his lab is the development of molecular and mathematical tools to understand the landscape of infectious diseases and development of immunity, across ages and across the world, through the development and coupling of novel high throughput serological tools with new statistical methods. Recently, for obvious reasons, his research has taken a turn towards understanding the epidemiology and immunology relating to the novel coronavirus. Michael’s research has been reported nationally and internationally in most major media outlets and Michael has been the recipient of numerous awards for his research and public health work, including being named by The Economist as one of eight “Global Progress Makers”, his research was awarded the top scientific research award for junior investigators from the US Academy of Clinical and Laboratory Physicians and Scientists, and most recently Michael is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. Galit Alter - Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Virology
Dr. Galit Alter is a Professor of Medicine at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. Her researched is focused on the development of systems biology tools to define the correlates of immunity against infectious diseases that ravage the globe. Her work points to unexpected mechanisms of protection against HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, has led to the development of novel diagnostics to monitor chronic infections/diseases, and now promises to accelerate the development of novel classes of therapeutics able to deploy the activity of the innate immune system in a specific and controlled manner. Irene Bosch - CEO, CTO and Founder at E25Bio
Leaving behind the comfort of a thriving academic research environment to enter the start-up E25Bio Inc. almost two years ago, we set to develop affordable rapid diagnostics for epidemic diseases. The idea is that the sooner one can report and track an epidemic, the sooner it can be controlled. Especially, diseases that affect millions, do not have any antidote, vaccine or drugs that can attenuate their epidemic spread. E25Bio is a spin off company from the MIT lab where such diagnostic devices were invented by a group of talented individuals. The idea was to construct a platform that would generate high quality antibodies, and such antibodies would bind circulating virus proteins and detect the virus in the body tissues, including blood or epithelial sample and using a simple device with no moving parts. The virus detection tests could be also read by a phone app, do not require a trained person to interpret the tests and the systematic gathering of the data would create the opportunity for fast reporting digital solution in “real time”. We hope to build such transforming idea incorporating a "bottom to top” public health response by using the diagnostic tests to initiate the chain of actions: Faster data, faster solutions, better outcomes. In Venezuela, Irene was trained as a Biologist. She then pursued higher education at Harvard School of Public Health. After working for decades in the ecology of virus diseases in the Caribbean, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras and India, back and forth USA lab at Umass Medical School, she was certain that negligence and lack of attention to Public Health topics was a huge danger to all. Today SARS CoV-2 appeared to confirmed this fear. We hope to help you see a few steps further into the future and enjoy some realistic optimism for the next few months!
Our webinar will be hosted on YouTube Live. Registrants will receive the link in an email shortly before broadcast.
