Month: September 2019

One day meeting on 26th July ,2019

The Society for Developmental Biology Satellite Symposium hosted the first global specialist PCP meeting since 2013 on ‘Planar Cell Polarity in Development across evolution’

The talks spanned all aspects of PCP biology across Drosophila, Zebrafish, mouse and human.

Charlotte Dean’s talk, ‘The PCP pathway in Lung Development and repair’. highlighted the importance of the PCP pathway for proper lung morphogenesis during embryonic development. It also summarised more recent data looking at the role of Vangl2 in the adult lungs.  Making use of Vangl2Lp heterozygotes, which are viable as adults, Charlotte described how dysfunction of the PCP pathway lead to significant morphological and functional defects in the adult lungs, highlighting a role for the PCP pathway beyond embryonic development. This correlates with their findings that in the human population, individuals with a particular Vangl2 SNP who smoke, have significantly lower lung function compared to smokers without this SNP.  

July 15-18 2019, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA.

The International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy hosted the bi-annual invitational Conference on Stem cells, Cell therapies and bioengineering in lung biology and disease

This meeting brings together scientists working on a variety of different regenerative medicine approaches to treat lung disease. The meeting covered advances in discovery biology, 3D models for lung research, technology and current approaches being trialed as potential treatments for lung disease.  Charlotte presented an invited talk entitled ‘Live imaging of alveologenesis in Precision-Cut lung slices reveals dynamic epithelial cell behaviour’.