The Second Global Organ Banking Summit: Convergence of Scientific Fields and Technical Domains (obs2016) at Harvard is the first ever conference of its kind, building on a series of recent meetings and other momentum including the inaugural Organ Banking Summit at Stanford, the NSF sponsored Roadmapping process and Washington D.C. Workshop, a White House Roundtable on Organ Banking and Bioengineering and the first ever Complex Tissue and Organ Banking grants program from the DoD. The goal is to continue this momentum by bringing together up to 20 important domains of science technology that have been identified by obs2015 and the NSF Roadmapping Process as crucial to solving the remaining sub-challenges to organ banking, but that have not yet interfaced with the field. Complex tissue and organ preservation is a key unsolved challenge that can impact global organ shortage and transplant rejection problems, by bringing together diverse specialties such as bioengineering, drug discovery, and emergency medicine. The obs2016 will be hosted in partnership with the Harvard Medical School/MGH faculty, the Organ Preservation Alliance (the Alliance) and the International Society for Cryobiology, with other world leading scientists and post-docs from academia and industry taking leadership roles on the Organizing Committee. The conference is bringing together leaders from classical organ banking fields like cryobiology, cryopreservation, supercooling and machine perfusion, with transplant surgeons and experts from fields including cell biology, bioengineering, physics, chemistry, mathematical modeling, nanotechnology and imaging to identify novel interdisciplinary approaches that can yield a variety of complex tissue preservation strategies. A grant from the NIH (NCATS) would support the participation of trainees/young investigators, as well as researchers and clinicians from diverse fields related to organ and tissue banking who have not previously had in-depth exposure to these challenges. This support will (1) provide opportunities to create new collaborations among fields that have not been traditionally been involved in organ banking, (2) enable the hosting of a multi-disciplinary scientific hackathon, workshops and poster sessions for trainees/young investigators, (3) attract experts from diverse fields who would not attend without travel subsidies, but whose perspectives will be critical in panel sessions and other discussions, with the hope that they will actively participate in the fiel going forward. The conference will emphasize opportunities for networking and collaboration by hosting round table discussions, single track sessions, informal discussions during hosted breakfast/lunch/dinner, poster sessions, young investigator - mentor pairing, etc. The requested funding will enable conference organizers subsidize travel for plenary and keynote speakers from non-traditional fields, as well as to provide grants for student trainees.
The second Organ Banking Summit will be held at Harvard Medical School and in Boston, MA from June 9-12, 2016 and will also feature virtual and physical workshops ahead of the summit and a Young Investigator Hackathon from June 7-12. The Summit will bring together leading scientific and medical experts from regenerative medicine, transplantation, trauma medicine, tissue preservation and other fields to address the challenge of organ and complex tissue banking.
