2019 Sponsor Talks
Daniel Ebneter
CEO of Karger Publishers
Daniel Ebneter is the CEO and a member of the Management Board at Karger Publishers, a globally active, independent, and family-owned medical and scientific publishing house in Basel, Switzerland. Lured away from an unfinished PhD in Applied Physics by the early temptations of the Internet, he embarked on a professional journey in Digital Business in such diverse domains as medical publishing, metals trading, academic teaching and consultancy. Prior to joining Karger in July 2017, Daniel Ebneter was a member of the executive board of the Hogrefe, a German-based psychology publishing group. His main interests include Digital Health, organization and leadership of companies subject to fundamental changes. In his brief talk, Daniel Ebneter will discuss how his professional journey in digital business helps him tackle the current shifts in the health sciences ecosystem as the CEO of an international publishing house.
PIs of Tomorrow, a first step to your professorship
Elena Cardenal, Life Sciences Switzerland (LS2)
The next “PIs of Tomorrow: The Future of Swiss Research” session will take place during the FEBS3+ LS2 Annual Meeting 2020 at the University of Zurich, 13-14 February. This plenary session offers international postdocs with Swiss ties interested in following an academic career the opportunity to present their research and future plans in a format similar to a professorship application interview. The selected participants will be invited for a 15-minute presentation in front of an audience of scientists and an expert jury composed of professors and other life scientists. For the first time next year, the LS2 Meeting will be jointly organized with the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) and the Austrian Association of Molecular Life Sciences and Biotechnology (ÖGMBT). We expect an audience of 500-700 people from Switzerland and neighboring countries!
Each talk will be followed by a public 10-minute discussion on various aspects of the activity proposed by the candidate. Afterwards, there will be aclosed one-to-one feedback with the jury members.The best presentation(s) will be awarded a jury prize and a public prize. However, everyone is a winner, as all presenters will have the opportunity to expand or refresh their network in Switzerland. For the 2019 edition we received around 60 applications from all over the world. Will you be one of the 2020 PIOT finalists?
Check out this year’s edition on: https://annual-meeting.ls2.ch/pis-of- tomorrow. The 2020 edition & call will be published in August under the same link.
Genome Editing with CRISPR/Cas9 Systems
Florian Meier, Merck
The CRISPR/Cas genome editing system has revolutionized most every aspect of the life science industry. As CRISPR becomes a focus of the molecular biology research community, Merck seeks to share methods learned and strategies applied in our years of gene editing experience. Merck (Sigma-Aldrich) is a pioneer as a commercial provider for targeted genome editing tools. With its 14-year experience, starting from the first generation of genome editing tools such as TargeTron® and Zinc Finger Nuclease, Merck has emerged as a prominent leader in the development of CRISPR system and provides a comprehensive portfolio of CRISPR- Cas9 products. We will compare the different single gene target formats for this technology such as Plasmid, mRNA and lentivirus and will focus on the advantages of the chemically synthesized SygRNA®, system which Merck provides as single guide and two-part synthetic crRNA and tracRNA in a modified and unmodified version. The SygRNA® decreases costs and can be easily used with Cas9 mRNA, Cas9 expressing cells/models and Cas9 Proteins. SygRNA® alleviates issues associated with random integration and reduces off target activity. We will discuss the current CRISPR Cas9 protein products and their applications including the most recent additions to our CRISPR protein portfolio, the GFP-SpCas9 and GFP-eCas9 fusion proteins. The two GFP-Cas9 fusion proteins offer great visualization of intracellular transfected Cas9 proteins, which can be used for enrichment of hard-to-transfected cell lines. Additional Topics to be discussed include whole genome human and mouse pools and arrayed CRISPR knock out libraries for screening such as the award-winning Sanger CRISPR array and the CRISPR SAM library delivering transcriptional co-regulators to a specific human or mouse target sequence using modified dCas9/gRNA complexes.