Neurological Disorders of Intracellular Trafficking

Keystone Symposia, Silverthorne CO

Investigators

Abstract

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Neurological Disorders of Intracellular Trafficking, organized by Dennis Drayna and Bettina Winckler. The meeting will be held in Keystone, Colorado from January 31 - February 4, 2016. Deficits in intracellular trafficking are a newly emerging, unifying theme in a broad range of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease and many others. Specific treatments for these disorders are either limited or unavailable. This meeting will look at how these trafficking deficits produce neuropathology, why these disorders are limited to the nervous system and how to elucidate trafficking networks and control points to identify novel drug targets. Specifically, it aims to: 1) Advance state-of-th-art knowledge in the cell biology of intracellular trafficking, the genetics of trafficking disordes, the clinical neurology of trafficking disorders and the methods used to identify drug targets; 2) Facilitate interactions between stakeholder groups who have traditionally had only limited contact; 3) Identify common themes, novel approaches and new collaborations to address the many large gaps in knowledge about trafficking disorders; and 4) Introduce graduate students and postdocs to the burgeoning field of disorders of intracellular trafficking. For the first time,the meeting will bring together groups that have traditionally not interacted, including cell biologist who study trafficking but have predominantly studied non-neural cells, clinical neurologists who do not typically work in cell biology, geneticists who have discovered causative genes for a wide range of neurological disorders but typically have limited expertise in the biological function of the gene products they identify, and drug developers, to cross-fertilize ideas and generate new collaborations.