Professor Ludger Johannes is Research Director (DRE) at INSERM. He is a member of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German organization of the academically gifted), Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and German Academy of Science — Leopoldina. At Institut Curie, he has been heading since 2001 the Traffic, Signaling, and Delivery Team, member of the excellence initiative Cell(n)Scale. Since January 2014, he has directed the Cellular and Chemical Biology unit. His research aims at establishing fundamental concepts of endocytosis and intracellular trafficking. The Johannes team has discovered the membrane trafficking interface between early endosomes and the Golgi apparatus, and demonstrated that lectin-induced glycolipid reorganization acts as a driving force in clathrin-independent endocytosis (termed the GlycoLipid-Lectin / GL-Lect hypothesis). The studies of the Johannes team have been published in highly visible international journals, including Cell and Nature. Between 2014-2020, he was the holder of an ERC advanced grant. He also aims at exploiting the discoveries of his team for the development of innovative cancer therapy strategies using the B-subunit of Shiga toxin (STxB) as a "pilot" for the delivery of therapeutic compounds to precise intracellular locations of dendritic cells for immunotherapy, and to tumors for targeted therapy.

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Dr. Avery Posey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He received Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2011) and his postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a classically trained molecular and developmental geneticist and an expert in the development and pre-clinical characterization of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and other engineered T cell strategies for cancer immunotherapy. His current research is focused on the redirection of T cells to target cancer-specific epitopes, especially glycan haptens and O-glycopeptide epitopes formed through altered glycosylation in cancer cells, investigation of optimal CAR-T signaling for effective anti-tumor responses and durable persistence in solid tumors, and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene-editing strategies for improved engineered T cells (knockout of checkpoint molecules - PD-1, CTLA-4, etc.; HDR knock-in of combination therapies). The major objective of his research is to increase the efficacy of engineered T cells in solid tumors.

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Dr. Feldman obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the supervision of Dr. Armando Parodi. After completing his postdoctoral training in Guy Cornelis and Markus Aebi labs in Switzerland, he joined the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, as an assistant professor. In 2015 he moved to the Department of Microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, USA. The Feldman lab is interested in microbial glycobiology and bacterial pathogenesis. Dr. Feldman has pioneered the field of bacterial glycoengineering, which is a promising approach for the generation of novel bioconjugate vaccines. He has co-founded two companies (VaxAlta and Omniose) in this area. He is a world leader in studying the human pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii and the biogenesis of bacterial extracellular vesicles. Dr. Feldman is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

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Professor Matthew P. DeLisa is the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on understanding and controlling the molecular mechanisms underlying protein biogenesis--folding and assembly, membrane translocation, and post-translational modifications--in the complex environment of a living cell. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1996; a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2001; and postdoctoral work at the University of Texas-Austin, Department of Chemical Engineering. DeLisa joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University in 2003. He has also served as a Gastprofessur at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in the Institut für Mikrobiologie. He has garnered a number of honors and awards, including most recently the Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication, and was named the to the inaugural “Life Sciences Power 50” by City & State New York. He is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In recent years, he has served on the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group and the National Academies Committee on Innovative Technologies to Advance Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.

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Dr. Lara K. Mahal is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics and a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. Her work focuses on systems-based approaches to understanding glycans, complex sugars that encode information governing human health. She developed lectin microarray technology, a high-throughput method for analyzing glycans that is now widely applied to understand the role of these sugars in a multitude of systems, from clinical cancer research to host-pathogen interactions. She is also known for her ground-breaking work on microRNA regulation, including the discovery of upregulation as a common feature of the miRNA regulatory landscape. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Beckman Foundation Fellowship (2004), NSF CAREER Award (2007), Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2008), NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2008), the Horace S. Isbell Award (2017) and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics (2019). In 2022, she founded the Glycomics Institute of Alberta (GIA) at the University of Alberta.
 

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Dr. Katharina Paschinger gained her doctorate in 2008 and has been a self-financed FWF Fellow at the Universität für Bodenkultur Wien since 2009. She has led three projects related to glycan diversity in different species, ranging from model and parasitic nematodes to marine species, such as molluscs and echinoderms. Over the years, she has developed and optimized glycomic workflows based on off-line HPLC-MALDI-TOF MS, suitable for discovering a wide range of glycan epitopes, including unusual fucosylated, glucuronylated, sulphated, and zwitterionic modifications of N-glycans, with roles in self/non-self-recognition. She is the author of some 50 original papers, including publications in Molecular & Cellular Proteomics and Nature Communications, as well as various review articles and book chapters. Privately, she is a mother of three children and a passionate gardener and opera lover.

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Dr. Kadomatsu started his career in basic medical research after being a physician of pediatric neuroblastoma. During his graduate studies, he discovered the glycan-binding growth factor midkine. He has been researching the involvement of cancer, neurology, and inflammation. For this achievement, he received the Young Investigator Award from the Japanese Biochemical Society in 1997. 
His research with a Chinese graduate student led him to become particularly interested in the relationship between glycans and the nervous system, which has become the focus of his research. He was a representative of "Neuroglycobiology" (2011-2015), the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT). He currently represents the "Human Glycome Project," Roadmap 2020, MEXT. 
He served as the President of the Japanese Society of Carbohydrate Research, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biochemistry, and representative of the Asia/Australia/Africa region of the Advance in Neuroblastoma Research Association. He holds an honorary professorship from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.


 

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Professor Shang-Cheng Hung received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (1992). He did postdoctoral research with Professor Andrew Streitwieser at the University of California at Berkeley (1994-1995) and Professor Chi-Huey Wong at The Scripps Research Institute (1995-1998). Professor Hung started independent research at the Institute of Chemistry, Academia Sinica, in 1998 and moved to the Department of Chemistry, National Tsing Hua University, in 2005. In 2009, he moved back to Taipei and joined the Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, where he was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2012. His research interests aim to develop new strategies for synthesizing complex carbohydrates such as glycosaminoglycans and sialo-sugars on the cell surface to probe their specific interactions with disease-associated proteins.

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Dr. Guérardel is a senior researcher for CNRS (Lille University, France) and an Invited Professor at iGCORE (Gifu University, Japan). His research focuses on the structure-to-function relationships of complex carbohydrates, from microorganisms to higher eukaryotes, mostly in the context of host-pathogen interaction. His main objective is to understand how the glycans from both host and pathogen fine-tune the infectious process and how they may be used as diagnosis or therapeutic tools, with a keen interest in mycobacterial, fungus, and viral infections. To reach this goal, Dr. Guérardel integrates a wide range of scientific approaches, including synthetic chemistry, structural analysis using NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, structural biology of proteins, and enzymology.

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Dr. Narimatsu is an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Center for Glycomics, Ph.D. (2008, Tsukuba University, Japan). His study focuses on the structure, biosynthesis, and genetic regulation of complex carbohydrates. He received training for eight years at the glycobiology lab, Research Center for Medical Glycoscience (RCMG) in Japan. Joined a Center of Excellence in Glycomics funded by the Danish National Research Foundation at the University of Copenhagen in 2012 and contributed to developing a comprehensive and high-throughput platform for CRISPR/Cas9 gene targeting of the human glycome (GlycoCRISPR), a large library of glycoengineered cells (GlycoDisplay), a cell-based platform for the display and production of human Mucin tandem repeat (MucinDisplay). His research interests include a basic understanding of genetic regulation and biosynthesis of protein glycosylation, consequences of deficiencies in glycosylation in diseases, and biomedical applications. 

His group has taken a global "glycogenome" engineering approach to protein glycosylation and proposed a Cell-Based glycan array platform to display the human glycome–i.e., display of all human glycans on proteins, proteoglycans, and lipids. This self-renewable array is useful for discovering biological interactions involving glycans, and screening of true high-affinity interactions with glycans requires the natural biological context of specific proteins and cell surfaces.

 

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