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Microbiology: Current Research 2017 | Volume 1, Issue 2
allied
academies
Joint Conference
GLOBAL APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY CONFERENCE
MICROBIAL & BIOCHEMICAL RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGIES
&
October 18-19, 2017
Toronto, Canada
International Congress on
T
he second decade of the twenty-first century marks a
perfect storm of patent expirations, contracting western
economies, and increasing demands from “payers” that
pharmaceuticals demonstrate cost effectiveness of their drugs.
The result is the shrinking of “big pharma” right before our eyes
and nowhere has the impact been felt more than in infectious
disease research at large pharmaceutical companies. All the
while bacterial resistance to antibiotics is increasing even as
the number of new drugs being developed to treat bacterial
infections is at its lowest point, since the dawn of the antibiotic
era. This surfeit of new agents implies that the traditional
approaches to drug discovery and development have run their
course and novel (entrepreneurial, opportunistic) approaches
for the treatment and prevention of microbial infections (and
forestalling the emergence of resistance) are required. Against
that background, we have seen an increasingly convoluted
regulatory regime with indications being parsed finer and finer
yet with larger numbers of patients required to reach arbitrary
(but often clinically meaningless) statistical endpoints. To date,
there has been some modest biologics drug discovery efforts
to discover novel antibacterial agents for the prevention and/
or treatment of
Staphylococcal, Pseudomonal
and
Clostridium
difficile
infections but these efforts now appear to be picking up
speed and are progressing in the clinic. Is there hope?
Speaker Biography
Steve J Projan is the head of Infectious Diseases and Vaccines Innovative Medicines unit
(iMED) at MedImmune, leading a cross-functional team dedicated to the therapeutic
area strategy, prioritization and advancement of the company’s infectious disease
and vaccine portfolio. He has joined MedImmune in 2010 as Senior Vice President of
Research and Development and head of the Infectious Diseases and Vaccines iMED.
Prior to joining MedImmune, he served as Vice President and Global Head of Infectious
Diseases at Novartis. He has previously spent 15 years at Wyeth in roles of increasing
responsibility, with his last post as Vice President and Head of Biological Technologies.
During his time at Wyeth, he has started the Biologics Discovery Group (covering all
therapeutic areas) and initiated multiple collaborations and partnerships, most notably
with Cambridge Antibody Technology (now a part of MedImmune/AZ). Prior to his
work in the industry, he spent 14 years at the Public Health Research Institute and
presently has over 110 publications to his credit. He has received a Bachelor of Science
from MIT, and, from Columbia University, a Master of Arts and Philosophy in Biological
Sciences and a Doctorate in Molecular Genetics.
e:
projansj@medimmune.comSteven J Projan
MedImmune, UK
Novel monoclonal antibodies for the prevention and treatment of bacterial infections