Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Autophagy Network Integration in Health and Disease, organized by Drs. Ivan Dikic, Anna Katharina Simon and J. Wade Harper. The meeting will be held in Copper Mountain, Colorado from February 12-16, 2017. Autophagy is a quality control mechanism that plays an important role in health and disease, including cancer, infection, inflammation and neurodegeneration. The core autophagy machinery has been identified and studied in detail. In addition, integration and cross-talk with other cellular pathways is becoming clearer, providing a rationale for why autophagy is linked to so many diverse (patho)physiological functions. It is becoming obvious that autophagy pathways implicated in chronic inflammation and infection also contribute to the development of cancer. Future challenges are focused on integrative structural, molecular and system approaches that are able to provide a much more refined understanding of autophagy regulatory networks. This meeting will highlight basic molecular and network insights in the autophagy system that are critical in life processes and multiple disease areas, and will examine the prospects for therapeutic targeting of the autophagy system. The meeting will bring together a variety of investigators exploring different facets of autophagy, and their interactions will expand our knowledge of fundamental autophagic mechanisms in different physiological and pathological settings.
Autophagy is one of the fastest growing research areas in cell biology. Over the last 2 or 3 years the high therapeutic potential of the field has become apparent with the discovery of variations in autophagy or related genes underlying diseases, SNPs associations being uncovered in chronic diseases, and the first drug screens with successful hits published. The purpose of the Keystone Symposia meeting on Autophagy Network Integration in Health and Disease is to bring together researchers exploring different facets of autophagy to exchange perspectives, to better understand how to experimentally approach these critical questions, and to foster new efforts to understand how modulation of the autophagy system can be used to combat diseases such as neurodegeneration and cancer.
