Webinar Description:

Inflammation and immunity play a pivotal role in a large number of diseases. There are classic autoimmune diseases such as: Lupus, Rheumatoid arthritis, Multiple sclerosis, Type I Diabetes; allergic diseases: such as atopic dermatitis and asthma; and diseases where the immune response is ineffective: chronic infections and cancer. To be sure we have made great advances in all the disease areas with new anti-inflammatory drugs for autoimmunity and allergy as well as immune activators for oncology. However, there is still need for additional therapies with the goal of curative treatment.

When studying these complex diseases, it very useful to break them down into innate and adaptive immune responses, though the reality can be more complex. The innate immune system is responsible for rapid, non-specific response to any foreign body. A simple example is neutrophils rushing to the site of a skin laceration to prevent infection. While the adaptive immune response is a relative slower process where T and B cells generate receptors or antibodies over the course of days to recognize invading pathogens or aberrantly self-proteins. An example would be generating antibodies to neutralized a virus while also providing long lived immunity.

Just as with the disease themselves, when studying new mechanism or drugs for immune indications it often beneficial to test the effect on innate and adaptive immune responses separately. This webinar will cover the utility various pre-clinical animal models to test the effect of novel drug targets on innate and adaptive immunity. Specifically, we will review delayed type hypersensitivity, T cell dependent antigen response, and Toll-Iike receptor models with a focus on how these models can advance new drug targets.

Speaker:

Jeffery Cowden, PhD
Executive Director of Pharmacology
PharmaLegacy Laboratories

Jeffery is an experience drug hunter with over 18 years of working experience at large pharmacutical companies focusing autoimmunity, allergy and cancer. He has published on the effects of novel drugs in RA, asthma and atopic dermatitis. His work has contributed to 8 IND filing over his career.