Sponsor or Organizer: Cambridge Health Institute (CHI)

Description: Cells, tissues, and organs function in a 3-D environment. Utilization of 3-D in vitro tissue models can help validate functionally new targets and pre-selected hits more efficiently than immediate in vivo testing. Drug development is a time and money consuming process, particularly the discovery and the preclinical phases that include steps calling for further optimization in order to reduce time, costs and the risk of product failures at later developmental or commercial stages. These bottlenecks are even more critical because high-throughput screening, combinatory chemistry, computational biochemistry and virtual pharmacology are continuously advancing. CHI's 3rd Annual Tissue Models for Therapeutic Development brings together tissue engineers constructing the 3-D tissue models with biologists studying healthy vs. diseased states and pharmacologists developing high-throughput compound screening assays. As with 3-D tissue models, each specialty provides insight into the complete system.

Dates: 08/15/2006

Location: Boston, MA, USA