October 24:Laureate Lectures

9:00 AM-  Opening Remarks from Janet Rossant, Gairdner President and Scientific Director

9:05 AM - "Decoding DNA"

Speaker: Shankar Balasubramanian, FRS, Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge

9:33 AM - "Applications of physical sciences to biomedicine, next generation DNA sequencing and beyond"

Speaker: David Klenerman, FMedSci, FRS, Professor of Biophysical Chemistry, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge

10:00 AM - "Next Generation Sequencing inception: the “Lemanic branch” journey”

Speaker: Pascal Mayer, PhD, CEO & Co-founder, Alphanosos; Honorary Chair at the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Strasbourg (USIAS)

10:25 AM - Health Break

10:43 AM - "The Promise of T cell Engineering"

Speaker: Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, Director, Center for Cell Engineering, Stephen and Barbara Friedman Chair, Sloan Kettering Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA

11:10 AM -  “Engineering effective and accessible CAR T cells”

Speaker: Laura Evgin, 2024 Gairdner Early Career Investigator

11:23 AM - "Human Milk: the Original Superfood & Personalized Medicine"

Speaker: Meghan Azad, PhD, Professor, Pediatrics and Child Health, University of Manitoba; Research Scientist, Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba; Director of Science & Knowledge Mobilization, THRiVE Discovery Lab; Co-Director, Manitoba Interdisciplinary Lactation Centre (MILC); Canada Research Chair, Early Nutrition and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease

11:50 AM - "Maternal humoral factors modulate offspring gut immune homeostasis to mitigate diabetes development”

Speaker: Sue Tsai, 2024 Gairdner Early Career Investigator

12:03 PM - "How evolutionary biology brought me to biomedical research"

Speaker: Christian Landry, PhD, Professor of Biology and Biochemistry, Laval University; Canada Research Chair in Cellular Systems and Synthetic Biology

12:30 PM - "Understanding unique protein features with precision genome engineering"

Speaker: Raquel Cuella Martin, 2024 Gairdner Early Career Investigator

12:40 PM - "India for the world: The story of rotavirus vaccines”

Speaker: Gagandeep Kang, FRS Adjunct Professor, Christian Medical College, Vellore, India; Director, Enteric, Diagnostics, Genomics and Epidemiology, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

1:05 PM - Closing Remarks: Janet Rossant, President & Scientific Director, Gairdner Foundation