The event was hosted by AstraZeneca in beautiful Gothenburg in Sweden from May 9–11. It was the first ECBS in Scandinavia and we received excellent support from our local Swedish partners, who  joined our research infrastructure as a new member country in 2022. 

The outstanding program ranged from excellent keynote presentations to interactive poster sessions, exhibitor highlights and also included a guided tour of the Astra Zeneca site. Renowned experts and thought leaders, many of them collaborating with EU-OPENSCREEN, gave their captivating insights, innovative ideas and shared their visions for the future, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and the potential for scientific advancements to transform lives. Four of the chemical biology presentations were tightly linked to click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry, the development of which secured the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. All the techniques discussed have the potential to profoundly impact on future therapies. The following exciting key notes were given: 

Therapeutic OLIGOs key notes:

Therapeutic OLIGO profiling

Frank Bennett,  Ionis Pharmaceuticals:  “Antisense Based Therapeutics for the Treatment of Neurological Diseases”

Advancements in OLIGO design and synthesis

Marie Wikstrom Lindholm, Silence Therapeutics Gmbh: "Therapeutic siRNAs: how do we find the “best” ones?"

Novel formulations and biomarker analysis

Steven Dowdy, UCSD School of Medicine : "Delivery of RNA Therapeutics: How Do We Pull Off The Great Endosomal Escape?"
 

Chemical Biology key notes:

New ways to shape and interrogate biology through chemistry

Katherine Donovan, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: "Chemoproteomic profiling surveys the degradable proteome"

Chemical probe-induced protein interaction and degradation

Stefan Kubicek, CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences: "Chemical control of subcellular protein localization"

Innovative tools and methods for advanced cell profiling

Shantanu Singh,Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT: "Finding disease phenotypes and candidate therapeutics using images: Cell Painting"