8:30 am Morning Networking Coffee

8:55 am Chair’s Opening Remarks

Discovering Better Biomarkers for Clinical Monitoring & Exploring New Therapeutic Avenues to Treat Patients in Need

9:00 am Harnessing the Endogenous Melanocortin System to Resolve IBD – A New Paradigm to Treat Inflammatory Diseases

Synopsis

  • Biasing tissue and immune cells towards resolving inflammation
  • Unprecedented safety by employing the natural mode of resolution removes efficacy/ toxicity balance considerations
  • Exploring the need for and type of patient stratification biomarkers

9:30 am Using Biomarkers to Change our Approach to Early Clinical Development

Synopsis

  • Proof of concept studies (POC) today are time consuming, costly and deliver undifferentiated therapeutic options for patients mainly because current clinical endpoints lack dynamic range and carry imprecisions
  • Defining complementary molecularly based clinical endpoints with high dynamic ranges and very low intra- and inter-assessor variability would beneficially impact the duration of POC studies
  • Defining complementary molecular-based clinical endpoints would also allow a thorough comparison of existing and upcoming therapeutics in a disease area 

10:00 am Morning Networking Break

Enhancing Safety & Efficacy to Accelerate Patient Access to Personalized Drugs

11:00 am Achieving the Selectivity Required for the Elusive Trifecta of Safety, Efficacy, & Convenience in IBD Drug Development

  • Jamie Wong Senior Director, Immunology, Morphic Therapeutics

Synopsis

  • Driving high selectivity of integrin-targeted medicines with Morphic’s MInT Platform
  • Leveraging understanding of integrin structure and function to develop novel molecules designed to achieve the potency, high selectivity, and pharmaceutical properties required for oral administration
  • Employing innovative end points to accelerate decision making for POC studies in IBD

11:30 am Harnessing Biomarker Signatures for Phenotypic Stratification in IBD: Leveraging a Precision Medicine approach to maximize the mechanistic potential of ESN-X

Synopsis

  • Deep molecular phenotyping addresses the complexities of the underlying biology in IBD.
  • Multi-omics and machine learning enable identification of patients most likely to benefit from specific drugs.

11:40 am Roundtable Discussion: Companion Diagnostics, Data Handling, & Effective Drug Development – The Future Steps

  • Jamie Wong Senior Director, Immunology, Morphic Therapeutics

Synopsis

  • Handling real-world data to evaluate the long-term efficacy and safety of IBD treatments.
  • Leveraging companion diagnostics to facilitate personalized treatment approaches for IBD
  • How can companion diagnostics predict the efficacy of combination therapies?
  • What is the most effective source of data for achieving accurate and reliable companion diagnostics?
  • What steps should we be taking to collect, store, and handle data to inform better decisions regarding the right drug, to the right patient, at the right time?

12:40 pm Lunch and Networking Break

Delving into Novel Approaches to Deliver Best-In-Class IBD Drugs to Patients in Need

1:40 pm Panel Discussion: Exploring the Fusion of Novel Approaches to Comprehensively Tackle IBD

  • Matt Staron Principal Scientist, AbbVie
  • Paul Kayne Vice President, Palatin Technologies
  • Alexander Lukyanov Senior Director, Data Science, Merck & Co
  • Aditya Khosla Chief Technology Officer and Board Member, Iterative Health
  • Bernat Olle Chief Executive Officer, Co-founder & Board of Directors, Vedanta Biosciences Inc

Synopsis

  • Can research into the microbiome work in unison with other new approaches to provide a deeper understanding of IBD?
  • Which therapeutic avenues remain underexplored and should be focused on?
  • How will developments in cutting-edge drug delivery technologies enhance treatment precision?
  • The holistic understanding – combining our knowledge, old and new, to pave the steps for future research into IBD

2:40 pm Unconventional Players in IBD Pathogenesis & Precision Therapies

Synopsis

  • An in-depth exploration for the capacity of emerging approaches regarding non-immune cells to revolutionize our understanding of IBD
  • Exploring the capacity for precision medicine strategies target these unconventional players to open new avenues for IBD treatment innovation

3:10 pm Biological Differences on Population and Individual Levels Provide Intriguing Data for Precision Medicine in IBD

  • Zhi Chai Postdoctoral Fellow, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Synopsis

  • The discovery and the differential downstream signal of a protective allele in MRGPRX2 highlighted the importance of investigating biological differences on population level
  • Individual variations in certain cell types and biological processes can be highly valuable for drug response prediction and for further forwarding the boundary of basic science

3:40 pm Chair’s Closing Remarks

3:50 pm End of 2nd Precision Medicine in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Summit