Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Microbiome in Health and Disease, organized by Drs. Julie A. Segre, Ramnik Xavier and William Michael Dunne. The meeting will be held in Keystone, Colorado from February 5-9, 2017. This Keystone Symposia meeting brings together experts in clinical medicine, clinical microbiology, microbial genomics, and bacterial genetics to explore how both strain variation and underlying microbial community determine health and disease. Genomic advances provide higher-level resolution to both pathogen and host genetic determinants. This meeting aims to explore how monitoring and potentially altering the microbial community may modulate and predict disease risk. Opportunities for interdisciplinary interactions will be significantly enhanced by the concurrent meeting on Inflammation-Driven Cancer: Mechanisms to Therapy, which will share a plenary session with this meeting. Relevance to NIAID: This meeting brings together scientific experts to discuss novel therapies that prevent or correct microbial community dysfunction to promote health and treat disease. Meeting participants will explore mechanisms of microbial community resilience and human immunity to find novel strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance and emerging pathogens, bacterial, fungal and viral.
Scientific studies have transformed our concept from microbes as pathogenic enemies to include microbes equally fundamental and beneficial role in promoting health across a human?s lifespan. Harnessing colonization resistance by microbial communities and developing novel therapeutic approaches are an urgent need that requires better understanding of these host-microbe interactions. The Keystone Symposia meeting on Microbiome in Health and Disease will fill this acute need in the scientific community, and will be the premier meeting focusing on clinically-actionable and mechanistic insights of host-microbe interactions.
