Aging and the immune system

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This R-13 application seeks partial support for a Satellite Meeting "Aging and the Immune System" in conjunction with the International Congress of Immunology (ICI) to be held in Milan, August 22-27, 2013. This meeting will bring together scientists from all over the world including American and European scientists whose intellectual focus is the immunology of aging. This conference, will take place in Milan on August 20th and 21st, 2013. Here we request funds to allow participation by speakers from the United States. The planned conference will provide an excellent venue for constructive discussions on recent achievements in research on the aging immune system, advantages and limits of the usage of genomics, including the microbiome, as well as methodological development and clinical application in this field, participation from pharmaceutical companies and vaccine development. We expect that this meeting will significantly contribute to a more integrated and better-coordinated European and American research structure in immunogerontology. In addition, we believe that the meeting, particularly with its opposition to the ICI, will attract ne investigators and trainees to the field. This meeting will enforce already existing collaborations and support the creation of new translational studies which will benefit the aging human population. The venue, the Milan Congress Center, MiCo, is the largest conference facility in Europe, opened in 2011, located in downtown Milan and therefore easily accessible by Metrorail and fully handicap accessible. First goal of the meeting is to summarize recent progress in research on immunology of aging, addressing the most important research areas such as adaptive, innate and clinically applied immunology. The second goal is to trigger a critical discussion on the advantages, limits and potential problems of the application of these discoveries to future interventions which can better help the elderly (vaccines). Recent vaccine development, biomarkers to predict responsiveness, and recently discovered interventions will be discussed. The third goal is to design future strategies on (a) how to optimize interaction, networking and collaborations in this specific research field, and (b) how to organize continuous interchange between European and US scientists. Historically, the focus of immunology and aging in the US has been with murine systems, whereas in Europe has mainly been with humans. This meeting will allow better interaction not only of the 2 different geographical but also disciplinary groups, and will make a substantial contribution to further strengthen immunogerontology as a distinct, generally accepted field within basic immunology.