Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Cilia, Development and Human Disease, organized by Elizabeth Petri Henske, Jeremy F. Reiter and Joel Rosenbaum. The meeting will be held in Tahoe City, California from March 2-7, 2014. One means by which cells sense their environment and communicate with each other is through cilia - minute hair-like projections that extend from a cell's surface. Our understanding of the cilium and ciliary-based signaling continue to rapidly advance, providing novel insights into diseases in which ciliary defects appear to play a dominant role in disease initiation (""""""""ciliopathies""""""""), as well as diseases such as cancer in which ciliary defects appear to play a critical role in disease progression. Increasingly, an understanding of ciliary disease mechanisms is leading to novel therapeutic strategies. This meeting will bring together leaders in basic mechanisms, translational research, and clinical research, with the objective of bridging the gaps between basic discovery and human disease. The general topic of this meeting is relevant to the NIDDK mission due to the role of cilia in pathogenesis of polycystic kidney disease and other kidney ciliopathies.
One means by which cells sense their environment and communicate with each other is through cilia - minute hair-like projections that extend from a cell's surface. Defects in ciliary function cause a diverse group of diseases, called ciliopathies. The Keystone Symposia meeting on Cilia, Development and Human Disease will bring together basic scientists working on model genetic systems in studies on cilia assembly and function with clinical researchers working on the ciliopathies in vertebrate models and in humans and thereby catalyze both bench to bedside and bedside to bench advances.
