2019 IPF Summit Continues Previous Year’s Work to Advance Therapies

Key pharmaceutical and academic leaders in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) will gather at the Third Annual IPF Summit in San Diego to discuss the latest developments in the field.

The conference, taking place Aug. 27-29, aims to create a discussion and networking environment to overcome the translational gap between preclinical data and clinical outcomes, a major challenge in the development of truly effective IPF therapies.

Last year’s meeting gathered experts and IPF pharmaceutical therapy developers who worked together to enhance experimental animal models to address IPF mechanisms, improve clinical trial design, and identify the next generation of IPF targets.

This year, the summit is expected to bring together more than 150 of the world’s leading IPF treatment developers from 100 organizations. They will further advance previous meetings’ efforts to advance IPF therapies’ development.

Based on last year’s numbers, more than half the attendees are expected to be pharma and biotech companies, academics (18%), and preclinical modeling and diagnostic experts (14%).

The 2019 summit will feature keynote speakers Fernando Martinez, MD, executive vice chair of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College; Ganesh Raghu, MD, director of the interstitial lung disease, sarcoid, and pulmonary fibrosis program at Washington University; Toby Maher, PhD, professor of interstitial lung disease at Imperial College of London; and 28 other speakers.

Pharmaceutical companies, including Promedior, Biogen, Genentech, Celgene, and AstraZeneca, will also be represented at the conference.

Treatments currently show great potential to slow IPF progression, but their development has also highlighted the need for effectively predictive preclinical models and proper clinical trial designs, critical to the success of therapy candidates to reverse fibrosis.

With this in mind, attendees will have the opportunity to hear insights on translational roadblocks, including:

• How to treat progressive fibrosing interstitial lung disease (ILD) as a parallel to IPF;
• Understanding scleroderma-ILD as a path for proof of concept;
• Evaluating cellular senescence (age-associated deterioration) as a new pathological feature for target identification.

Event organizers say the conference will be “expanding upon an even greater breadth and depth of content” that is expected to help academia and biopharma “advance the IPF drug development frontier.”

Participants will have the opportunity to register for three pre-conference workshops set for Aug. 27.

• Workshop A will be led by Sunhwa Kim, principal scientist at Merck. The workshop will address biological features, and potential treatments for IPF that overlap with other fibrotic diseases.
• Workshop B will be led by Mary Salvatore, associate professor at Mount Sinai Medical Center. It will address radiological imaging tools and their potential to evaluate IPF.
• Workshop C will be led by Peter Schafer, executive director of translational development at Celgene. This workshop will be a working meeting of the Prognostic Lung Fibrosis Consortium (PROLIFIC).

The summit’s full event guide is available here.

The venue for the summit is the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, 1380 Harbor Island Drive, San Diego. Register by June 28 to save up to $600. Registration details can be found online, by email at [email protected], or by calling 415-735-3289.