Increasing the tool-kit: applying the latest technologies to advance respiratory disease research
Hot topicsChairs: S. Holgate (Southampton, United Kingdom), S-E. Dahlén (Stockholm, Sweden)
Aims: High attrition rates and long development times make respiratory drug development one of the most expensive therapeutic areas in terms of drug R&D costs. The paucity of preclinical models which are predictive of human respiratory disease is a major contributing factor to this. This session will showcase how the latest technologies can be adopted to improve our understanding of human respiratory disease and increase the toolkit of models available to researchers. The latest, cutting edge research on a lung-on-a-chip model, applying state of the art mathematics, an invertebrate model to study molecular mechanisms of disease, and microcancers for lung cancer drug development will be presented. Participants will come away from the meeting inspired by the potential these technologies can offer to respiratory disease research and will have identified potential new approaches/collaborators to advance their own programmes of research.