Mini-Symposium on Pharmaceutical Cryo-EM applications

Last September 20th, the IMpaCT project organised a Mini-Symposium on Pharmaceutical Cryo-EM applications that counted with the participation of 4 renowned Pharma and Biotech companies – Taiana Maia de Oliveira from AstraZeneca, Michael Saur from Astex Pharmaceuticals, Wim Voorhout from Thermo Fisher Scientific and Paul Thaw from SPT Labtech.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and to overcome several limitations with the organization of in-person meetings, the Project Coordination team decided to organize this event in an online format. The event started with brief presentations from all the guest speakers followed by 2 round-table sessions. Despite the virtual format, the Coordination team believes that there was a good level of interaction between the participants and the guest speakers. Furthermore, with this format, we were able to welcome participants world-wide.

In this online event, the project welcomed 46 participants from different seniorities and affiliations, from national and international research institutes, universities and pharmaceutical companies, such as iBET, BIAL, Sanofi, Pfizer and BluePharma. We also had the pleasure to welcome participants from the ESRF and the ALBA synchrotron.

During the event, the participants had the opportunity to interact with our four guest speakers during the virtual round-table sessions, an informal setting where it was explored the different projects being developed in these companies and the advances on the Cryo-EM instruments.

The event was considered a success by all the participants and the coordination team hopes to be able to further promote new interactions with industrial stakeholders.

Dr. Wim Voorhout from Thermo Fisher Scientific kindly allowed the recording of his talk. 

Taiana Maia de Oliveira from AstraZeneca

Paul Thaw from SPT Labtech

Michael Saur from Astex Pharmaceuticals

Wim Voorhout from Thermo Fisher Scientific