Symposium Sessions

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

New biomaterials can contribute to drug delivery by enabling spatiotemporal control of drug release, overcoming biological barriers on multiple levels, and providing additional functions to enhance the precision of the delivery. Significant efforts have been made to improve the efficacy and safety of anticancer medicine in the last few decades. Lessons learned from past efforts are now applied to address fundamental challenges in drug delivery and expanded to new opportunities in emerging therapeutic fields such as gene editing and immunotherapy. This symposium will invite experts in the field of controlled drug delivery, nanomedicine, biomaterials, cell therapeutics, and global health to discuss fundamental issues, innovation, and new opportunities in drug delivery.

We welcome abstract submissions on a broad range of topics relevant to local and systemic drug delivery as well as imaging and diagnostics, including drug-device combination products; nanomedicine for novel applications such as infectious diseases and neurological disorders; drug/vaccine delivery for enhancing global health; functional biomaterials for immunotherapy; cell-based therapy; machine learning in the design of drug and carrier. We will actively promote discussions on challenges in clinical translation of novel drug delivery systems and new combinations of drug delivery and emerging therapeutic modalities.

Topics will include:

• Drug and device (Drug-device combination, Scaffolds)
• Nanomedicine for cancer therapy
• Nanomedicine for novel applications
• Machine learning for drug delivery design
• Gene delivery/editing
• Bioinspired materials for drug delivery
• Local drug delivery
• Brain barrier and CNS delivery
• Infectious disease and global health
• Biomaterials and drug delivery for immunotherapy
• Cell-based therapeutics
• Imaging and Theranostics

Invited Speakers:

• Yunching (Becky) Chen (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
• James Dahlman (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
• Bruno De Geest (Ghent University, Belgium)
• Tejal Desai (University of California, San Francisco, USA)
• Andrew Ferguson (The University of Chicago, USA)
• Dan Heller (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, USA)
• Ick Chan Kwon (Harvard Medical School, USA)
• Dennis Lee (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USA)
• Wenguang Liu (Tianjin University, China)
• James Moon (University of Michigan, USA)
• Elizabeth Nance (University of Washington, USA)
• Juliane Nguyen (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
• Guangjun Nie (National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, China)
• David Nisbet (Australian National University, Australia)
• Dan Peer (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
• Gaurav Sahay (Oregon Health & Science University, USA)
• Tatiana Segura (Duke University, USA)
• Conroy Sun (Oregon State University, USA)
• Tina Vermonden (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
• Jun Wang (South China University of Technology, China)
• John Wilson (Vanderbilt University, USA)
• Kim Woodrow (University of Washington, USA)
• Chae-Ok Yun (Hanyang University, Republic of Korea)

Symposium Organizers