37th Annual Symposium on Nonhuman Primate Models for AIDS

Texas Biomedical Research Institute, San Antonio TX

Investigators

Abstract

37th Annual Symposium on Non Human Primate Models for AIDS PROJECT SUMMARY This conference grant (R13) application requests funds to partially cover the cost of planning, organizing, publicizing and hosting the 37th Annual Symposium on Nonhuman Primate Models for AIDS. The symposium will be held November 12-15 of 2019 at the Omni La Mansion del Rio Hotel in San Antonio, Texas and will be hosted by the Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC). The Symposium coincides with the 20th anniversary of the creation of the SNPRC. This meeting is the only forum that exclusively encompasses the most recent scientific advances in AIDS research utilizing nonhuman primate (NHP) models. It is anticipated that more than close to 250 scientists from the United States and other countries will attend; the organization will offer 20 travel awards for Early Career Investigators. The symposium program will include a Keynote Speaker presentation by Dr. Mario Roederer, five half-day scientific sessions and a poster session. The theme of the meeting will be ?Advancing the Translational Value of the NHP Model?; meaning that the meeting will offer a platform for our colleagues to describe how new technological advances are affecting NHP research, and how this NHP research is contributing to develop new therapies, vaccines, and knowledge about AIDS and AIDS-related maladies. The scientific sessions will comprise the areas of Biology of Primate Lentiviruses, Pathogenesis of Lentiviral Infection, Co-infections in the NHP Model, Therapeutics/Cure in the NHP model, and Vaccine Development. Each session will have an invited Chair, who will give a state-of-the-art presentation to open the first half of the session, a co-Chair, who will moderate the session and entertain questions, and eight to ten oral presentations rigorously selected from submitted abstracts. A Scientific Program Committee consisting of fifteen members representing a broad geographic and institutional distribution will review abstracts in a blinded fashion and assign oral or poster presentation for each of the scientific sessions. Criteria for selection of oral presentations will include scientific relevance of the topic as well as originality and quality of the information contained in the abstract; proper gender representation will also be a factor, as well as an effort to include underrepresented minorities. Authors giving talks will be invited to submit their presentations in manuscript form for publication in the special conference issue of the Journal of Medical Primatology; a poster session will include meritorious presentations that cannot be accommodated in one of the platform sessions. The conference will also include an opening reception on the day of arrival, a reception accompanying the poster session, and an evening banquet at the nearby Briscoe Western Art Museum. In addition to the R13 grant financial support, registration fees and corporate sponsorship will be collected to defray the largest portion of the costs of the entire symposium. The Symposium will also include an educational outreach-training session with local high school Science teachers; the purpose of the training will be to provide these teachers with strategies and course materials to be used in their classrooms for teaching about HIV/AIDS and biomedical research, particularly research using animal models. First announcement of the 2019 meeting was made at the 36th Annual Symposium in Seattle in October of 2018, and this will be followed-up with invitations to be distributed in the early spring of 2019.