Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.
The Prime Minister wants to defeat dementia by 2025 and says: “Dementia now stands alongside cancer as one of the greatest enemies of humanity.” It affects over 800,000 people in Britain, at huge cost to the UK economy and at a huge personal price to the families and carers of those affected.
We have ideas about how dementia could be tackled in terms of management and treatment: including better drug delivery to the brain, improving early detection methods and providing an environment in which dementia patients can live safely and at relative peace.
But there are still more questions than answers in terms of the speed of research, care provision and the ethical debate around early diagnosis.
Join experts from the Medical Research Council and Oxford Dementia and Ageing Research (OxDARE) in an open and enlightening discussion on how we can defeat dementia: or at least manage it in light of new early detection methods. Defeating Dementia will be hosted by writer and broadcaster Quentin Cooper.
From the struggle to get up on a Monday morning to coping with jet-lag, the body has to carefully balance our need to be alert or to be at rest. But how does the
brain control this? How much sleep do we really need? Join us to hear Dr Peter Oliver discuss some of the facts and myths surrounding sleep; highlighting new research in this area as well as the role of genetics in the control of circadian rhythms. Plus, why do flamingos sleep on one leg??? Come along and find out!
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Egyptomania: The Allure of Ancient Egypt
With Henrietta McCall, Department of the Middle East, British Museum
2pm Saturday, 11 October 2014 at Ashmolean Museum | Venue Information
Henrietta McCall talks about the enduring appeal of ancient Egypt in western culture. She assesses how it began with Napoleon in the early 19th century; how symbols and imagery from antiquity inspired architecture, gardens, furniture and fashion; and how in the 1920s that appeal reached its climax with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
Professor Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; Professor of Global Health; and Commissioner on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, will provide his perspective on the key long-term challenges in global health, addressing the burden of both communicable and non-communicable disease.
This seminar will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome.
Join in on twitter with #c21health
This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEwlBU7bNrA
About the speaker:
Professor Peter Piot is the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a Professor of Global Health. Professor Piot is also a Commissioner on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations. In 2009-2010 he was the Director of the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College for Science, Technology and Medicine, London. He was the founding Executive Director of UNAIDS and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1995 until 2008, and was an Associate Director of the Global Programme on AIDS of WHO. Under his leadership UNAIDS became the chief advocate for worldwide action against AIDS, also spear heading UN reform by bringing together 10 UN system organizations.
Professor Piot has a medical degree from the University of Ghent (1974) and a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp (1980). In 1976 he co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, the Free University of Brussels, and the University of Nairobi, was a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington, a Scholar in Residence at the Ford Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He held the chair 2009/2010 “Knowledge against poverty” at the College de France in Paris, and is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was elected a foreign member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, and is also an elected member of the Académie Nationale de Médicine of France, and of the Royal Academy of Medicine of his native Belgium, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
He was knighted as a baron in 1995 and has published over 550 scientific articles and 16 books, including his memior No Time to Lose. In 2013 he was the laureate of the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize for Medical Research and in 2014 he received the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health.
Overture to the Oxford Ceramics Fair
With Janice Tchalenko, potter
Ashmolean Lecture Theatre
Fri 17 Oct, 2–3.30pm
Janice Tchalenko is an award-winning potter whose work has been exhibited internationally and commissioned for retail outlets such as John Lewis. In this lecture Janice talks about her work and inspiration.
Prof Peter Visscher, Professor and Chair of Quantitative Genetics, Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland
Driven by advances in genome technologies, the last 7 years have witnessed a revolution in our understanding of complex trait variation in human populations. Results from genome-wide association studies and whole-genome exome studies have shown that the mutational target in the genome for most traits appears to be very large, such that many genes are involved in explaining genetic variation. Genetic architecture, the joint distribution of the effect size and frequency of variants that segregate in the population, is becoming clearer and differs between traits. I will show new results from disparate complex traits including height, schizophrenia, motor neurone disease and gene methylation, to illustrate polygenicity and the power of experimental sample size.
The first speaker in Oxford Females in Engineering, Science and Technology brand new speaker series ‘Inspiring STEM’ promises a fascinating talk on her research and personal experiences in combining professional career and personal life, do not miss out:
Professor Helen McShane is a Professor of Vaccinology and Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow at Oxford University, where she leads a programme of research to develop a new vaccine for Tuberculosis (TB). The BCG vaccine currently administered to children has been around for 90 years and shows only a limited and short-lived effect. Crucially, it does not offer protection against pulmonary TB, which is the most common form of the disease. TB remains a major killer worldwide with 1.4 million victims a year, and resistance has evolved to many drugs used to treat it, so new ways of preventing the disease are badly needed.
Helen originally planned to become a GP, but after 6 months in practice decided to embark on clinical medicine and PhD research into infectious diseases. By the time she arrived at the defense of her thesis, she had been pregnant with her second child and she has successfully juggled home and work life ever since (now, a mum to 3 children).
‘Inspiring STEM’ series of talks aims to bring together Oxford’s Women in STEM, showcase the research performed by the very best scientists and engineers, and inspire the audience to realize their potential. It reflects the academic aspect of OxFEST while providing a glimpse into possible career paths that we can take.
What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong? In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor’s oath to ‘do no harm’ holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks…
Henry Marsh will be discussing his book, ‘Do No Harm’.
The Sick Rose is a beautifully gruesome and strangely fascinating visual tour through disease in an age before colour photography. This stunning volume, combining detailed illustrations of afflicted patients from some of the worlds rarest medical books, forms an unforgettable and profoundly human reminder of mankinds struggle with disease. Incorporating historic maps, pioneering charts and contemporary case notes, Richard Barnetts evocative overview reveals the fears and obsessions of an era gripped by epidemics. Richard will be accompanying his talk with a slide show presentation of the books illustrations in all their glory – not for the squeamish!
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
No other large-scale health intervention can have as big an impact on child mortality as vaccination. Across the world millions of lives have been saved by innoculation, and in the past ten years the annual number of measles cases worldwide has dropped from one million to 200,000. But just as important as creating new vaccines is ensuring that children have access to them. Join us at the Oxford Martin School as Dr Matthew Snape, Consultant in Vaccinology at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS trust and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford, looks at the challenges involved in making sure the success story of childhood vaccination can be a global one.
Join in on twitter with #c21health
This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CO2L5Rq7tU
Unwrapping Tutankhamun
With Dr Christina Riggs, Senior Lecturer, School of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia
Ashmolean Lecture Theatre
Tue 28 Oct, 2.30‒3.30pm
After three years of work in the tomb, Howard Carter and his team were ready to reveal the body of Tutankhamun. Using photographs and diaries from the excavation, this illustrated lecture follows Carter’s work in stages as they worked through the layers of wrappings around Tutankhamun’s body, and considers what else we can learn from the unwrapping of other materials in the tomb.
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
Dr David Clifton, Royal Academy of Engineering University Fellow in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford, will discuss how healthcare systems world-wide are entering a new, exciting phase: ever-increasing quantities of complex, multiscale data concerning all aspects of patient care are starting to be routinely acquired and stored, a process in which mobile health (or “m-health”) has a key role to play.
This seminar will describe the next generation of mobile healthcare technologies, where much of the key, underpinning research is taking place at Oxford. David will describe how mobile healthcare can improve patient outcomes, allow patients a greater stake in managing their own conditions, and, in underdeveloped regions, improve access to affordable healthcare.
Join in on twitter with #c21health
This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C4CrjeQsOk
About the speaker:
Dr David Clifton is a tenure-track member of faculty in the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford, and a Governing Body fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is a University Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
A graduate of the Department of Engineering Science, Dr Clifton trained in information engineering and was supervised by Professor Lionel Tarassenko CBE, Chair of Electrical Engineering. He spent four years as a post-doctoral researcher in biomedical engineering at Oxford before his appointment to the faculty, at which point he started the Computational Health Informatics (CHI) lab.
Dr Clifton teaches the undergraduate mathematics syllabus in Engineering Science, runs the graduate course in machine learning at the Oxford Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation, and teaches engineering policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford. He is a founding Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical & Healthcare Informatics (JBHI), an Associate Editor of BMC Medical Informatics, and of the British Journal of Health Informatics & Monitoring (BJHIM). He is the Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Affordable Healthcare (OxCAHT).
Dress up to party like it’s 1922 and discover the decade’s fascination with Ancient Egypt at an evening of Jazz Age performances, workshops and talks.
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FREE ENTRY
7 – 10.30pm
Halloween night: Friday 31 October 2014
The Rooftop Bar and Vaulted Café will be serving drinks until 10.30pm.
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For programme news see:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1445682889032169/
or
http://www.ashmolean.org/livefriday
In Conversation: Sir Norman Rosenthal and Dr Georgina Paul
‘Joseph Beuys & Jörg Immendorff’ Exhibition Event
Wednesday 5 November, 11.30am–12.30pm
At the Ashmolean Museum
Join the curator of the exhibition, Sir Norman Rosenthal, as he discusses the social and political context of these two seminal German contemporary artists with Dr Georgina Paul, Associate Professor in German and Fellow at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford.
Entry is free and no booking is required.
Find out more about our ‘Joseph Beuys & Jörg Immendorff: Art Belongs To The People!’ at http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/details/?exh=92
The Innovation Forum, a student led, UK-wide network, invites all medics, entrepreneurs, scientists and coders to connect at our Oxford Launch event and to find out about “Digital Health: Opportunities and challenges in Oxford”. Our experienced panel of 4 speakers will cover a range of topics but we envisage touching upon core themes such as:
• What is digital healthcare?
• What opportunities exist in Oxford for talented coders/entrepreneurs etc. to connect with the medical community?
• What issues exist with access and use of data? How can students/interested people navigate this
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
Non-fat, low-fat, saturated fat, trans fats, healthy fats – in an era where we seem to be constantly bombarded with often conflicting messages about our diets, is all this information actually making us any healthier? How can we cut through media hysteria and make wise choices about the food we eat, and what impact do our consumption habits have, not just on our own health but that of the planet?
Speakers:
Professor Susan Jebb, Professor of Diet and Population Health, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford
Dr Tara Garnett, Principal Investigator, Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food
Dr Mike Rayner, Principal Investigator, Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food
Join in on Twitter with #c21health
This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UbwkWsEdmU
About the Speakers:
Professor Susan Jebb is a nutrition scientist and her research interests are focused on how what we eat affects the risk of gaining weight or becoming obese and the interventions that might be effective to help people lose weight or reduce the risk of obesity-related diseases. She has also conducted a series of randomised controlled trials to study the impact of dietary changes on the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. In general, this work highlights that body weight is a more important risk factor for ill-health than differences in the nutritional composition of the diet. She has strong scientific collaborations with the Behaviour and Health Research unit at the University of Cambridge and the MRC Human Nutrition Research unit, where she was a Programme Leader for many years.
She is also very interested in how scientific evidence on diet is translated into policy and practice, by government, industry, the public health community and the media. She was the science advisor for the Foresight obesity report and subsequently chaired the cross-government Expert Advisory Group on obesity from 2007-11. She is now a member of the Public Health England Obesity Programme Board. She also Chairs the DH Public Health Responsibility Deal Food Network, developing voluntary agreements with industry to improve the food environment. She is one of the Chairs of the NICE Public Health Advisory Committees. She is actively involved in a number of events and media projects to engage the public in issues relating to diet and health. In 2008 she was awarded an OBE for services to public health. She is a Trustee and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Obesity.
Dr Tara Garnett is a Principal Investigator at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food and she initiated, and runs the Food Climate Research Network, now based at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.
Her work focuses on the contribution that the food system makes to greenhouse gas emissions and the scope for emissions reduction, looking at the technological options, at what could be achieved by changes in behaviour and how policies could help promote both these approaches. She is particularly interested in the relationship between emissions reduction objectives and other social and ethical concerns, particularly human health, livelihoods, and animal welfare. Much of her focus is on livestock, since this represents a nodal point where many of these issues converge.
Tara is keen to collaborate through the FCRN with other organisations to undertake research, organise events and build and extend interdisciplinary, intersectoral knowledge in this field.
Dr Mike Rayner is a Principal Investigator on the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food and Director of the British Heart Foundation Centre on Population Approaches for NCD Prevention, which is based within the Nuffield Department of Population Health of the University of Oxford, and which he founded in 1993.
Mike’s particular research interests are in food labelling, food marketing, food taxes and the relationship between a healthy diet and sustainable diet.
Mike is also Chair of Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming in the UK, and Chair of its Childrens’ Food Campaign in the UK. He is a trustee of the UK Health Forum, Chair of the Nutrition Expert Group for the European Heart Network based in Brussels and a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the International Obesity Task Force. He is also an ordained priest in the Church of England.
A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.
Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and ‘pleasure hardening into boredom’
Thursday 6 November, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
The Mitre, corner of High St and Turl St (upstairs function room)
All welcome
Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.
Why Film Matters
Part of the Why Philosophy Matters Series
With Professor Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford University
Wednesday 12 November, 6‒7.30pm, Ashmolean Education Centre
Join esteemed scholars to talk about the hot topics in contemporary culture and philosophical thought. In partnership with Oxford Brookes University and sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Free, no booking required, seats allocated on a first-come first-served basis. Entry via St Giles’ Street, drinks from 5.45pm.
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
There remain many unanswered questions in medical research about both the prevention and treatment of disease, but new technologies are opening up new opportunities to provide insights. One approach, in particular, the capacity to assemble and analyse very large health datasets, is underpinning the work of both speakers addressing problems at both ends of life.
Kazem Rahimi is utilising innovative digital technologies and large healthcare datasets to find better approaches to managing established cardiovascular disease including heart failure. Terry Dwyer, on the other hand, is pooling data on one million mothers and babies to help uncover causes of childhood cancer – an area where, despite considerable effort, little progress has been made over recent decades.
Join in on twitter with #c21health
This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yURabFdYHJY
About the speakers:
Professor Terry Dwyer is the Executive Director of the George Institute for Global Health at the Oxford Martin School and Professor of Epidemiology, University of Oxford.
Terry is a non-communicable disease epidemiologist with extensive experience in the conduct of cohort and case control studies. He was previously Director of the Menzies Research Institute, University of Tasmania, coordinating research projects including those on cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, childhood asthma, and diabetes.
His work has focussed on infant and child health. His team’s research on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and sleeping position was recognised by the NHMRC, Australia, as one of the most important contributions to medical research by Australia in the 20th Century. Much of this work was conducted on the 11,000 infants enrolled in the Tasmanian Infant Health Survey (TIHS) between 1988 and 1995 and was supported by funds from both NH&MRC and NIH.
He is currently playing a leading role in two large global cohort collaborations. The first involves a collaboration of birth cohorts in more than ten countries to obtain prospective evidence on the causes of childhood cancer. Little prospective data on this association has previously been available. This consortium, the International Childhood Cancer Cohort Consortium (14C), seeks to assemble data on approximately 1 million mothers and babies who will be followed through childhood. It has been supported financially by NCI, and currently Terry is working on this from IARC.
The second study is focused on following around 40,000 subjects who were first measured at school age and are now moving into their fourth and fifth decades. The CDAH study is one of six coborts in three countries contributing data to this consortium. This study seeks to estimate the separate effect of childhood physical and lifestyle characteristics on risk of major adult diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There have been many publications on this including one in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2011.
Dr Kazem Rahimi, Associate Professor, is the Deputy Director of the George Institute for Global Health at the Oxford Martin School; James Martin Senior Fellow in Essential Healthcare at the University of Oxford and Honorary Consultant Cardiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.
As the Deputy Director he leads the Essential Healthcare Programme, which aims to find practical and affordable solutions for the global health priorities of the world’s largest emerging economies, as well as the priorities of vulnerable or disadvantaged populations in established economies.
He graduated in medicine from the University of Leipzig in Germany with postgraduate training in cardiology and health services research in Leipzig, London and Oxford. Prior to joining the George Institute, in 2010, he was a Research Fellow at Oxford’s Clinical Trial Service and Epidemiological Studies Unit. His research interests include service delivery innovation in chronic disease prevention and management, large-scale complex intervention studies, and data-driven electronic decision support systems.
The Colloquium is a seminar series at Kellogg College, Oxford.
Poppy is a 2nd year DPhil student at the department of Oncology. She completed her BSc Biochemistry at the University of Southampton and did a ‘sandwich’ year at AstraZeneca working on pre-clinical cancer drugs which is where she became fascinated by cancer biology. Poppy is also Secretary of OxFEST which supports women in STEM.
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
The next decade could see significant steps towards eradicating viruses which threaten the lives of millions of people worldwide. Major progress has been made towards a cure for hepatitis C, but at $84,000 for a course of treatment, will the cost of the drugs stand in the way of a global roll-out? And with the high cost and risks of toxicity and drug resistance making anti-retrovirals a less than ideal long-term solution for HIV patients, what breakthroughs are giving scientists hope in their efforts to find a cure for the virus?
Join in on Twitter with #c21health
This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7NwoOQP-s
About the speakers:
Dr John Frater is a Principal Investigator in the Institute for Emerging Infections, Oxford Martin School and a Clinical Research Fellow in The Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. John carried out his medical training at Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital. He undertook a PhD at Imperial College, studying African strains of HIV and their susceptibility to treatment.
Following this he gained a MRC Clinician Scientist Award to work at Oxford University researching HIV evolution and strategies for HIV eradication. He is currently the scientific lead and co-chair of ‘CHERUB’, (Collaborative HIV Eradication of Reservoirs: UK BRC), an NIHR-supported collaboration dedicated to finding a cure for HIV infection. He also works as an Honorary Consultant Physician at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
Dr Ellie Barnes is a Principal Investigator in the Institute for Emerging Infections, Oxford Martin School; MRC Senior Clinical Fellow and Honorary Consultant in Hepatology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford.
Ellie trained in medicine at St. Bartholomew’s hospital, London. Towards the end of her time there she took a year away to study human evolution, social biology and the philosophy of science at University College London. She specialized in liver medicine, attracted to this by the mix of practical and academic skills required. Her PhD was in T cell immunity to hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the context of therapy with Paul Klenerman and Geoff Dusheiko. She has been supported by the MRC (UK) throughout, more recently as a Clinician Scientist at the Peter Medawar Building for pathogen research in Oxford.
Public Seminar: Thinking About the Brain
With speakers: Professor Chris Kennard; Professor Glyn Humphreys; Professor David Lomas; Dr Joshua Hordern; Dr Ayoush Lazikani; Dr Matthew Broome; Dr Chrystalina Antoniades
Thursday 20 November, 5.30-8.30pm
Ashmolean Education Centre
The evening will offer an opportunity to explore current research into the brain and the mind from a wide range of perspectives, from medieval literature to contemporary art and neuroscience.
Thinking About the Brain is a public seminar, forming part of the developing collaboration between the Ashmolean Museum’s University Engagement Programme and Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. It is being co-organised by Dr Jim Harris, Andrew W Mellon Foundation Teaching Curator at the Ashmolean, and Dr Chrystalina Antoniades, Lecturer in Medicine at Brasenose College and Senior Research Fellow in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences.
Open to all and free of charge. To ensure a place, please follow this link to e-mail Dr Jim Harris (at jim.harris @ ashmus.ox.ac.uk), or telephone 01865 288 287.
Michaelmas Term 2014 Seminar Series
‘FERTILITY, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT’
Thursdays – 12:30 – 14:00
Seminar Room, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing,
66 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PR.
Convener: Dr Melanie Frost
Professor Chas Bountra and Dr Javier Lezaun take a fresh look at the way we organise early-stage (high-risk/high-reward) pharmaceutical research.
The drug discovery process is extremely high risk, takes too long and is becoming unaffordable. The pharmaceutical industry, despite massive investments, has been forced to reduce risk and costs. With ageing societies and the rise of chronic diseases of modern living, we desperately need better therapeutics. Professor Chas Bountra and Dr Javier Lezaun will examine alternatives to the traditional way of doing things, and propose a radical solution – arguably the only way to resolve this dilemma.
Join in on twitter with #c21health
This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oamayzlviAM
About the speakers:
Professor Chas Bountra is Professor of Translational Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine; Associate Member of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford and Chief Scientist at the SGC (Structural Genomics Consortium). He is also a Visiting Professor in Neuroscience and Mental Health at Imperial College, London. Chas is an invited expert on several government and charitable research funding bodies, and an advisor for many academic, biotech and pharma drug discovery programmes.
His current research is aimed at determining the 3D X ray structures of novel proteins, generating novel small molecule inhibitors, using these to dissect disease networks and hence identifying new targets for drug discovery.
Chas is an advocate for pre-competitive science, up to and including Phase IIa clinical studies. The SGC publishes all findings immediately (more than one per week), works closely with over 100 academic labs across the world and 8 pharmaceutical companies, and shares all reagents and expertise freely.
Chas has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and has experience of all stages of discovery and development. He was involved in the launch of Alosetron for the treatment of IBS, has progressed more than 30 clinical candidates, many of these into Phase II studies and 5 into Phase III studies. His therapeutic expertise is in neuro-psychiatric, gastro-intestinal (GI) and inflammatory diseases.
Dr Javier Lezaun is James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance, and Deputy Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Oxford Martin School. Javier received a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University, and before coming to Oxford faculty he held positions at the London School of Economics and Amherst College. Javier is a Fellow at Kellogg College.
Javier directs the BioProperty research programme, an initiative funded by the European Research Council to examine the role of property rights in biomedical research and explore the value of open innovation models in pharmaceutical R&D. He is currently investigating the organisation and governance of pre-competitive R&D against neglected tropical diseases, and the role of IP regimes in the evolution of stem cell biology, synthetic biology, and the development of transgenic organisms.