ABA/ASB biophysics and medicine session 2018

Abstract

Split over two days on the third and fifth of December in 2018, we held two sessions focusing on Biophysics and Medicine at the joint Asian Biophysics Association/Australian Society for Biophysics meeting. This session was jointly chaired by myself, Dr. Matt Baker, (UNSW), and Prof. Jamie Vandenberg (Victor Chang Institute), with a specific focus on research in biophysics that intersected with disease, infection, treatment, or translation to patient therapy, akin to some of the chairs' work in this area previously (Lau et al. 2018;Nichols et al. 2019). We had two local invited speakers, Dr. Rob Salomon (Garvan) and Prof. Ewa Goldys (UNSW), and two invited international speakers: Prof. Zhihong Zhang (HUST, China) and Prof. Fan Bai (Peking University, China). Dr. Rob Salomon from the Garvan-Weizmann Centre for Cellular Genomics in Sydney opened the first session as an invited speaker to talk about his recent work combining flow cytometry with whole transcriptome sequencing to build profiling tools for breast cancer (Salomon et al. 2019). This was followed by invited speaker Prof. Ewa Goldys who showcased her work on biophotonics and nanoscale probes to add molecular functionality to fluorescent nanoparticles to build a suite of sensors (Ma et al. 2019). Our first international guest, Prof. Kenshiro Manuyama from Nagaoka University (Japan) then spoke on his work using human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) to study cellular migration during human gastrulation .After a short coffee break, we welcomed another five speakers! Prof. Hye Ran Koh from Chung-Ang University (Korea) spoke about RNA interference and the use of single-