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Monday, November 9, 8:00 AM–8:55 AM
John H. Rex, MD
Senior Vice President and Head of Infection and Global Medicines Development, AstraZeneca
Lecture: Enabling Drug Discovery and Development to Address the Crisis of Antimicrobial Resistance: New Tools, New Pathways, and Remaining Challenges
Since September 2012, Dr. Rex has also been a Non-Executive (Independent) Director, F2G, Ltd. Based in Manchester, UK, F2G Ltd is dedicated to discovery and development of new and clinically superior drug classes to treat life-threatening systemic fungal infections in at-risk patient populations. Through his work at AZ and F2G, Dr. Rex and his colleagues have antibacterial and antifungal molecules in all phases of development from Phase 1 through registration and marketing.
During his time in Industry, Dr. Rex has led multiple Industry interactions with FDA, EMA, and other external groups with a focus on enhancing available development pathways and the approaches to value for antimicrobial agents. His key activities have included lead authorship of a publication describing an updated approach to regulatory paradigms for antibacterial agents,1 co-authorship of other publications on the challenge of antimicrobial resistance, founding and ongoing participation in creation and implementation of the New Drugs For Bad Bugs (ND4BB) program within the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) in Europe (including founding participation in the design of DRIVE-AB, a new ND4BB topic focused on evaluation and implementation of novel business models for antibiotics), a 4-year term as Industry Representative on the FDA Anti-Infective Drugs Advisory Committee (AIDAC, 2007–2011), ongoing active leadership within the antimicrobial working groups for EFPIA and PhRMA, ongoing roles (currently Vice-Chair of the Area Committee on Microbiology) with the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institutes (CLSI), membership in the Brookings Council on Antimicrobial Drug Development, and (2014) a role as an advisor on Antimicrobial Resistance to PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Dr. Rex is also a Highlights Advisor for Nature Reviews Microbiology, is a member of the Wellcome Trust Seeding Drug Discovery Committee, serves on several editorial boards, was formerly an Editor for Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, and is an Emeritus Editor for www.doctorfungus.org, a non-profit website devoted to dissemination of information about medical mycology.
Dr. Rex has an MD from Baylor College of Medicine and is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. Before moving to Industry in 2003, Dr. Rex was Professor of Medicine at UT Medical School-Houston with a focus on translational studies of novel antifungal agents and hospital epidemiology |
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Wednesday, November 11, 8:00 AM–8:55 AM
Jacob Corn, PhD
Scientific Director at the Innovative Genomics Initiative, University of California, Berkeley
Lecture: The CRISPR/Cas9 Genome Editing Revolution
Jacob Corn is the Managing Director and Scientific Director of the Innovative Genomics Initiative and faculty at UC Berkeley in the department of Molecular and Cell Biology. Jacob did his graduate work with James Berger, where his work helped redefine the organization of the bacterial replication fork, and a postdoc with David Baker, where he computationally designed protein-protein interactions from scratch. For several years he was a group and project team leader at Genentech in the department of Early Discovery Biochemistry, leading multidisciplinary teams to interrogate mechanism and feasibility for challenging therapeutic pathways in the areas of neurobiology, infectious disease, and oncology. While specifically providing insight into the molecular underpinnings of ubiquitin signaling, Jacob's research generally bridges reductionist mechanism with cell biology, with the overarching goal of understanding how biophysical properties interact within the cellular environment to shape signaling behavior and how disease arises when these properties go awry. As the director of the IGI, Jacob is committed to pushing the boundaries of next-generation genome editing for transformative insights into fundamental biologies and to laying the groundwork for clinical and commercial applications of the technology. Jacob is furthermore dedicated to building new models for collaboration between academic and commercial organizations, mentoring at the interface of the two areas, and actively promoting entrepreneurship in the biological sciences.
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