Day 1 – Wednesday 15 April
09:45 – 10:15	Registration and Refreshments
10:15 – 10:30	Welcome and Introduction:  Antony Galione (Oxford, UK)
Session 1	Organelles and Disease (Chair : Margarida Ruas, Oxford UK)
10:30 – 11:00	Frances Platt (Oxford), UK
11:00 – 11:30	Andrea Ballabio (Naples, Italy)
11:30 – 11:45	Oral Communication  1
11:45 – 12:00	Oral Communication  2
12:00 – 12:30	Emily Eden (UCL, UK)
12:30 – 13:00	Nuno Raimondo (Penn State, USA)
13:00 – 14:00	Lunch and Poster Viewing
Session 2	Emerging techniques for studying drug effects on organelles (Chair: Sandip Patel UCL, UK)
14:00 – 14:30	Teresa Alonso (Valladolid, Spain)
14:30 – 15:00	Markus Rapedius (Nanion, Munich, Germany)
15:00 – 15:15	Oral Communication 3
15:15 – 15:30	Oral Communication 4
15:30 – 15:50	Partner Session
15:50 – 16:20	Refreshment Break
16:20 – 16:50	Anthony Morgan (Oxford, UK)
16:50 – 17:05	Oral Communication 5
17:05 – 17:20	Oral Communication 6
17:20 – 17:50	Katharina Duerr (Oxford, UK)
17:50 – 17:55	Closing Remarks
Conference Close

 

Day 2 – Thursday 16 April
08:45 – 09:10	Registration and refreshments
09:10 – 09:15	Welcome to day 2
Session 3	Drugging organelle targets (Chair: Professor Grant Churchill  Oxford ,UK)
09:15 – 09:45	Dr Cristina Mammucari (Padua, Italy)
09:45 – 10:15	Professor Christian Grimm (Munich, Germany)	Endolysosomal cation channels as drug  targets
10:15 – 10:30	Oral Communication 7
10:30 – 10:45	Oral Communication 8
10:45 – 11:05	Partner Session
11:05 – 11:35	Refreshment Break
11:35 – 12:05	Professor Marc Freichel (Heidelburg, Germany)
12:05 – 12:20	Oral Communication 9
12:20 – 12:35	Oral Communication 10
12:35 – 13:05	Professor Jonathan Marchant (Wisconsin, USA)
13:05 – 13:30	Closing remarks and Prizes
Conference Close

Professor Christian Grimm 

University of Oxford

Talk title: Endolysosomal cation channels as drug targets

Biography: Christian Grimm is Professor of Organelle Biology and Pharmacology at the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford, UK (50%) and -Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Walther-Straub-Institute
(WSI) of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Medical Faculty, Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich, Germany (50%)

In addition, since 2022 Christian is Head of the Department of Pharmacology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology (ITMP) and Immunology, Infection and Pandemic Research (IIP) in Munich/Penzberg.

Christian has been working in the field of ion channels, in particular TRP channels for more than 20 years, starting as a PhD Student (Dr. rer. nat.) at the Free University (FU) of Berlin, Germany, followed by Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at Harvard University and Stanford University, USA (2004-2009). In 2009 Christian joined pharmaceutical industry (Pfizer Ltd., UK) as a Principal Scientist working on TRP channels as targets to treat neuropathic pain. In 2011, Christian returned to Germany and to academia as a group leader in pharmacology at the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy of the LMU Munich. Since then he has focused his research on endo-lysosomal ion channels, in particular TRPML channels and two-pore channels (TPCs), resulting in several high-profile publications in PNAS, EMBO J., Nature Commun., Nature Protoc., and Science. For his work he received several awards, the Ernst-Reuter Award of the Free University Berlin (2005), the NCL Foundation Award Hamburg (2016), and the Care for Rare Award of the LMU Munich Childrens' Hospital (2017).

Christian also holds a PhD (Dr. phil.) in Philosophy in addition to his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) in Pharmacology.

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Professor Andrea Ballabio

Emeritus Director, TIGEM

Talk title: Lysosomal signalling in metabolic adaptation and tumorigenesis

Biography: Dr. Ballabio obtained his M.D. degree at the University of Naples, Italy, where he completed his residency in Pediatrics. He was then post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Genetics and Biophysics in Naples and at Guy’s hospital in London UK. He then moved to the USA where he was Associate Professor and Co-director of the Human Genome Center at the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. In 1994 he became the founding director of the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM) in Italy and served as TIGEM director for 30 years. In 1998 he became President of the European Society of Human Genetics. He is currently Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Naples “Federico II”, Group Leader at TIGEM, and Visiting Professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas USA, and at the University of Oxford, UK. He was the recipient of three 5 year-Advanced Grants of the European Research Council (ERC), in 2009, 2015, and 2022. In 2016 he won the Louis-Jeantet prize for Medicine in Geneva, Switzerland. He is Co-Founder of CASMA Therapeutics. He is an EMBO member and former member of the EMBO council. He has authored over 400 publications in international peer-reviewed journals. He was awarded by the President of Italy the Honorary Titles of "Commendatore" in 2007 and "Grande Ufficiale" of the Italian Republic in 2021. He was the 2025 winner of the Beth Levine, M.D. prize in Autophagy Research.

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More details about our speakers will be available soon.

Abstract Submissions Now Open! 

 
We are pleased to announce that abstract submissions are now open. If you would like to present your work, please submit your abstract before the deadline of Friday 13th February by 3pm (London, GMT).  
 
Before submitting, please ensure you have read the abstract submission guidelines carefully. Submissions that do not follow the guidelines may not be considered. 
 
Please note that you must be registered for the event in order to present your work. 
 
We will review all submissions promptly and aim to notify authors of the outcome in early March. 
 

Confirmed Partners

 

Oria Bioscience

ORIA Bioscience™ provides for the first time ready-to-use high-quality organelles preparations compatible with high throughput screening (HTS) Drug Discovery platforms. We empower and 
accelerate therapeutical discoveries, allowing pharmaceutic companies to conduct their processes directly on organelles (lysosomes, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum). Our products, LYSO-Prep™ and MITO-Prep™, bring together industrial scale, physiological fidelity, and true ready-to-use simplicity, making drug discovery moving from a cell-based vision to an organelle-based reality. Our organelles are customizable for all therapeutic areas and enhance assays results in terms of relevance, precision and reproducibility. Our fully functional and storable organelles, extracted and 
sorted by our patented microfluidic process, open the way for more accurate Hit-To-Lead and Lead optimization testing, offering efficacy, crucial for successful screening processes and decision-making in Drug Discovery. 



Exciting news! Our new partnership brochure is now available, please contact partnerships@bps.ac.uk for more information.