Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia conference entitled Neural Environment in Disease: Glial Responses and Neuroinflammation, organized by Drs. Richard Daneman, Dorothy Schafer, Michael V. Sofroniew and Vanda A. Lennon. The conference will be held in Keystone, Colorado from June 16-20, 2019. The response of the central nervous system to injury and disease is a complex physiological process that involves the coordinated actions of many different cell types. The interplay of neural cells and vascular cells along with the innate and adaptive immune systems determines the response to different injury and disease stimuli and whether the central nervous system will repair or degenerate. Understanding this complex cellular environment is essential to understanding disease pathogenesis, elucidating underlying disease etiology, and developing treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases. The goal of this conference will be to bring together people who study different aspects of neurological diseases and facilitate the interchange of ideas necessary for identifying new mechanisms underlying complex intercellular interactions in the diseased nervous system. This will include people who study resident neural cells (neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes), vascular cells (blood-brain barrier, lymphatics, glymphatics) and immune cells (microglia, innate peripheral immune cells, adaptive immune cells) in the context of a variety of neurodegenerative, neuroinflammatory, and neuropsychiatric diseases. Further, we will also attract people who implement different techniques including genetic mouse models, human iPSCs, invertebrate models, imaging, cell biology, and behavior in their research which will further facilitate exchange of ideas and foster collaboration. With the combined expertise at this conference, we will accelerate our ability to understand the complex neural response to injury and disease, which is a necessary step towards developing novel therapeutics for complex neurological diseases.
Neuroinflammatory processes play critical roles in many central nervous system disorders; they involve complex interactions between the immune system and neural cells, mediated by intrinsic and extrinsic immune effector cells and molecules. By convening researchers who study diverse cellular and physiological processes, different neural cell types, innate immune cell populations, adaptive immune responses, cerebrovasculature and lymphatic/glymphatic systems, participants at this conference will have the opportunity to forge new ideas, collaborations and afford appreciation of the complexity of the problem viewed as a big picture. We aim to attract scientists from basic research fields and translational research in both academia and industry, with the goal of fostering interactions that will drive new discoveries and impact the treatment of diverse CNS disorders.
