4^TH Central European Biomedical Congress

David E. Nichols, PhD is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.  He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy and was the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology, where he carried out teaching and research for 38 years prior to his retirement in 2012.  In 2004 he was named the Irvine H. Page Lecturer by the International Society for Serotonin Research, he received the first Purdue Provost’s Outstanding Graduate Mentor award in 2006, and was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy in 2012.  He began studying psychedelics in 1969 while a graduate student and continued that research throughout his entire professional career, being one of only a few investigators able to research psychedelics after they were scheduled.  In 1993 he founded the Heffter Research Institute (HRI), which funded the first rigorous clinical studies of psychedelics in humans after a nearly 40-year moratorium and served as its president for more than 25 years. HRI funded the groundbreaking Phase I and II studies of psilocybin for the treatment of depression, as well as substance use disorders. Dr. Nichols also synthesized the DMT used by Dr. Rick Strassman in his human studies, the MDMA that MAPS used for their Phase I and II clinical trials for PTSD, and the psilocybin used by several investigators for human clinical studies including the Phase I and II trials conducted at Johns Hopkins University by Roland Griffiths and his colleagues. He is considered the world’s leading expert on the chemistry of psychedelics. Dr. Nichols, although officially retired, remains active in the field through consulting and collaborations with several academic and pharmaceutical organizations and continues to publish scientific papers.

My work has concentrated on neural ensemble recordings in freely behaving rodents (rats and mice), with which we can record up to ~100 single neurons. I focused on the interaction between hippocampus and neocortex, in memory encoding and consolidation. We developed data analysis techniques to detect the activation of synchronized neuronal groups (‘cell assemblies’). Thus, we characterized the interaction between assemblies in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, demonstrating that replay of previously experienced neural patterns in the prefrontal cortex is correlated to hippocampal sharp wave bursts (Peyrache et al., Nature Neuroscience 2009). Furthermore, hippocampal/prefrontal coherence (between theta oscillations in the two sites) was strongest at the crucial phase of a rule-based decision making task, and coincided with the synchronous activation of cell assemblies, possibly controlled by dopamine. The same assemblies replayed the strongest in subsequent sleep, suggesting that hippocampal/prefrontal communication is related to the selection of information to retain for further consolidation (Benchenane et al. Neuron 2010).
In mice, we are currently studying the behavior of hippocampal place cells and hippocampal oscillatory dynamics in several transgenic models of impaired synaptic function (NMDA CA1 KO, developed in S. Tonegawa’s lab at the MIT) and of Fragile-X mental retardation (from B. Oostra’s lab, Rotterdam), with a miniaturized micro-drive developed in-house (Battaglia et al. 2008).
Within the EU funded consortia ENLIGHTENMENT and NEUROSEEKER, we are developing next generation tools for large scale neural ensemble recording and for the combined, closed-loop optogenetical stimulation of neural circuits.

Magdalena Paczkowska-Abdulsalam holds a MSc degree in molecular biotechnology from Gdansk University of Technology and a doctorate degree in medical biology from the Medical University of Bialystok (MUB). She had her first encounter with high-throughput omics technologies while studying some of her master’s degree courses at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. As a PhD candidate enrolled into the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies in English at MUB, she received an extensive education on experimental and computational techniques used in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and immunology. She was given further practical omics training at the Genomics Unit of the Spanish National Center For Cardiovascular Research in Madrid, Bioinformatics and Scientific Computing Facility of Vienna Biocenter in Austria, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA, among others. Her current research interests include the phenomenon of metabolically healthy obese phenotype and the latest advances in the field of high-throughput sequencing technologies.

Natalia Alenina is a senior scientist at the Max‐Delbrück‐Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC), Berlin, Germany. She has graduated with the M.S. degree in Biophysics at St. Petersburg Technical State University (Russia). Thereafter she moved to Berlin (Germany) and obtained her PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) degree in cardiovascular research in 2003 from Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacy Faculty at Berlin Free University (Germany). During postdoctoral training she changed the research field and got expertise in stem cell research and serotonin-related neuroscience. Her main research interests include work with genetically modified rodents to study interaction between peripheral and central serotonergic systems during development and in adulthood. She is (co)-author of more than 130 scientific publications, and published in amongst others PNAS, Nature, Nature Medicine, Translational Psychiatry and Journal of Neuroscience.

Noelle Anastasio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and member of the Center for Addiction Research at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Her laboratory focuses on the neurobiology of the patterns of individual differences in impulsivity and decision-making seen with respect to the development and maintenance of chronic health maladies associated with reward imbalance. Her goal is to determine that neuronal serotonin and glutamate systems mechanistically converge to govern impulsivity and that rebalancing these systems may ultimately support behavioral recovery in disorders marked by impulsivity concomitant with an imbalance in the reward system and reactivity to reward conditioned cues (e.g., addiction, binge eating disorder, obesity).

Marian Bubak has an M.Sc. degree in Technical Physics and Ph.D. in Computer Science. He is an adjunct at the Institute of Computer Science and ACC Cyfronet AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków, Poland, and a Professor of Distributed System Enginnering at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, grid systems, and e-science; he is the author of about 200 papers in this area, co-editor of 28 proceedings of international conferences and the Associate Editor of FGCS Grid Computing.

Dr. Lucia Caffino received her PhD in Pharmacology at the University of Milan in 2010. From 2011 to 2018, she continued her research as post-doctoral fellow at the University of Milan. She is currently assistant professor of Pharmacology and Pharmacognosy at the University of Milan. Dr Caffino has been honered for her research activity as young investigator in the field of neuropharmacology in 2016 (SIF-Farmindustria Award), 2017 (Alberico Benedicenti Award) and 2018 (Valentina De Castro Award). She is recipient of grants from Italian Agency (Ministry of Health) and Italian and foreign foundations (Cariplo and Nutricia Research Foundation).

Dr. Caffino’s research interest is the investigation of neurobiological basis of neuropsychiatric disorders with a primary focus on alterations in reward neurocircuitries, such as drug abuse and anorexia nervosa. Since these disorders are characterized by the inability to maintain physiological neuronal plasticity under specific environmental challenges, Dr Caffino is interested in disseting out whether these persistent alterations may induce cognitive deficit and contribute to the onset of psychiatric disorders, like depression, through molecular and structural alterations. She is author of 56 papers published in international journals with impact factor. Dr. Caffino is also active in the scientific dissemination of the results of her research activity through writing posts and through seminars in high schools.

Francesca Calabrese is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences (University of Milan). She got her degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology at the University of Milan in 2003. In the same University, she got her PhD in Pharmacotoxicological, Pharmacognostic Sciences and Pharmacological Biotechnologies at the Faculty of Pharmacy in 2007 discussing a thesis entitled ‘Involvement of the neurotrophin BDNF in the mechanism of action of antidepressant drugs and in animal models of mood disorders’. In 2007 she was awarded the fellowship ‘Borsa di perfezionamento all’estero’ in order to develop a project at the Zentralinstitut für Seelische Gesundheit-Univ Heidelberg, (Mannheim, Germany). Her scientific interest is focused on the study of psychiatric disorders pathogenesis. The experimental approach is intended to investigate the systems that can contribute to the development of such diseases through the use of animal models (genetic and environmental), as well as to characterize the mechanism of action of psychotropic drugs. She is principal investigator of 8 competitive grants (national and international). She is co-author of 67 peer-reviewed papers, 48 as first, second or last author (H-index= 30, Number of citations= 2673) She attended several international meetings and presented several posters and oral communications on her research. During these years, she received fellowship awards, travel grants and poster prizes.

Anna Ceglarek is a graduate of neurobiology at the Jagiellonian University. Her master’s thesis covered the impact of the time of day on the formation of false memories. She is currently running her PhD project in psychology and working in a research project aimed at using artificial neural networks to predict treatment progress in patients with multiple sclerosis.

Adrian Chrobak is the 2^nd year psychiatric trainee, PhD student at the Department of Adult Psychiatry, Jagiellonian University Collegium Medicum and Master of Science in Neuroscience. He authored 42 publications in the field of motor functions deficits in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients, chronobiology and the cerebellum in reputable scientific journals such as Molecular Neurobiology, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry or Journal of Affective Disorders.

Currently, Adrian Chrobak is conducting two research grants devoted to neuroimaging of motor deficits in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Combining various MRI techniques (sMRI, fMRI, rsfMRI, DTI), he is evaluating structural and functional neurocorrelates of novel eye movement disorder he discovered in group of schizophrenia patients – the convergence insufficiency with unilateral exophoria at near. The second neuroimaging project is devoted to evaluating implicit motor learning impairments in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia patients, especially focusing on the neural correlates of reversed learning features, the newly discovered impairments for the first time described in his previous studies.

Giulia Costa, MSc, PhD is Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Giulia Costa is author of more than 30 publications in International Scientific Journals and Books, and her main research interest involves the study of the neurotoxic and neuroinflammatory effects of amphetamine-related drugs, in particular 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ecstasy), and the so-called “novel psychoactive substances”. Other lines of research involve the study of the development of new preclinical models of early-stage Parkinson’s disease, the study of the interactions between caffeine and other recreational psychostimulants, and the study of ultrasonic vocalizations in rodents.

Wiesław Jerzy Cubała is the Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical University of Gdansk, Poland. His research interests focus on the psychopharmacology of anxiety and mood disorders with a particular interest in ketamine/esketamine use in depression as well as the serotonin-1A receptor function in major depression and panic disorder. Prof. Cubała runs a project on monoaminergic, proinflammatory activity measures and cognitive performance in mood and anxiety disorders. Currently, he is focussed on the study of ketamine use in major depression and bipolar depression, as well as clozapine use in treatment-resistant bipolar depression with a particular focus on suicidality and the rapid-cycling course of the disorders. Moreover, his research team develops screening tools for people with epilepsy suffering from mental disorders. Prof. Cubała is involved in training initiatives in postgraduate education in psychiatry and cognitive-behavioural therapy, including the development of the treatment guidelines for mood and anxiety disorders for psychiatrists and general practitioners. He is devoted to teaching both the clinical and research aspects of psychopharmacology.

Professor Bogdan Draganski, native Bulgarian, is Consultant Neurologist at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland, Director of the neuroimaging laboratory LREN and of the Departmental MRI platform. After qualifying in Clinical Neurology in Germany he spent time working on computational anatomy research in neurodegenerative and movement disorders at the Institute of Neurology, UCL London, UK followed by research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig Germany.

I was trained in state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging techniques to investigate brain anatomy correlates of neurological disorders. Using methods that I and colleagues developed, I will enrich these models with features from non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sensitive to brains’ myelin, iron and tissue free water content, to then test for systematic differences across cortico-striatal circuits and along spatial gradients within a given node of the studied networks. I pioneered computational anatomy research in use- dependent brain plasticity, developed and established new methods to understand the underlying biological phenomenon.

Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the Jagiellonian University Medical College. President Elect of the Polish Psychiatric Association, member of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology. Organizer of the annual Pharmacotherapy, Psychotherapy and Rehabilitation of Affective Disorders Conference (2017 – XXII edition). Chairwoman of the State Examination Commission in Krakow for psychiatry, member of the Local Organizing Committee of EPA 2019 Warsaw. Editor-in-chief of the journal Psychiatria Polska. Author and co-author of many publications about depression, bipolar disorders. Editor and co-author of several books on psychiatric issues.

Gordana Nedic Erjavec is a research associate at Ruder Boskovic Institute (RBI), Zagreb, Croatia, and a member of the RBI Biomedicine council. She received her PhD in Biomedicine and Health at University of Osijek, Croatia, in 2013. She did her postdoctoral training at the Centre for metabolomics and bioanalysis, University San Pablo CEU, Madrid, Spain, during which she specialized in the whole metabolome analyses using LC-MS and GC-MS. Her main scientific interests are biological psychiatry and the search for reliable biomarkers of psychiatric disorders using different methods of molecular biology, as well as metabolomics platforms. Until now she was included in 14 (6 Croatian and 8 international) scientific projects, with 6 of them currently active. She is a member of several international scientific associations, such as FENS, IBRO and EPHAR. She was rewarded with National Science Award of the Republic of Croatia-Annual Award for Junior Researchers for 2012 in the field of Biomedicine, Scientific award ‘Borislav Nakic’ of Croatian Academy of Medical Sciences for the best scientific paper in the field of medicine published in 2017 by the author from Croatia younger than 35 and Annual rewards of Ruder Boskovic Institute for scientific papers published in 2017 and 2018.

Web of Science ResearcherID: https://publons.com/researcher/2664343/gordana-nedic-erjavec/

Email: gnedic@irb.hr

Giuseppe Giannotti is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Jamie Peters’ lab at the University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical campus (CO, USA). He began his career in neuroscience as an undergraduate student in the Neuropsychopharmacology Laboratory of Dr. Fabio Fumagalli at the Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences, University of Milan (Italy). Dr. Giannotti’s project focused on investigating the molecular neuroadaptations induced by exposure to cocaine in adolescent rats. In 2014, he spent two months in the laboratory of Dr. Malgorzata Filip at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Krakow, Poland) where he learned how to implement intravenous cocaine self-administration models. Dr. Giannotti obtained his Ph.D. in January 2016, and he joined the laboratory of Dr. Jakie McGinty as a post-doc at the Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston, SC) in February 2016.  In the McGinty lab, Dr. Giannotti implemented, and successfully used chemogenetics, to functionally manipulate neuronal activity in defined neural circuits in vivo. His interest in using cutting-edge technologies to dissect the neural circuits mediating rewarding and aversive behaviors brought Dr. Giannotti to join the laboratory of Dr. Jamie Peters at the University of Colorado-Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus in June 2018 for a second post-doc. During his first year of post-doc in the Peters lab, Dr. Giannotti completed a project aimed at investigating how neuronal prelimbic cortex ensembles encoding fear modulate long-term memory retrieval using viral-mediated targeted recombination in active populations (TRAP) technology. Dr. Giannotti’s research is currently founded by a K99/R00 award from NIDA/NIH. By using slide electrophysiology, optogenetics and chemogenetics, he is investigating the contribution of paraventricular thalamic (PVT) circuits in opioid-mediated withdrawal syndrome and relapse to heroin seeking in heroin self-administration models.

Biotechnologist interested in cancer genetics. He spent three years on a post-doc position in the Institute of Human Genetics, Christian Albrecht’s University in Kiel concentrating on the genetics of classical Hodgkin Lymphoma. In 2015 he became Head of the Department of Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Human Genetics in Poznan where he continued research on the genome and epigenome of cancer cells.

Dr. Grabrucker received his MSc in Biology from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, and his PhD in Molecular Medicine from Ulm University, Germany. He continued his research in the United States at Stanford University, Stanford School of Medicine. From 2011 to 2016, he was tenure-track Assist. Professor and Executive Director of the Neurocenter of Ulm University. In 2017, he joined the Department of Biological Sciences, at the University of Limerick, Ireland and the Bernal Research Institute. He is now Associate Professor and Cluster lead of the Bio Materials Cluster of the Bernal Institute, a cluster with 20 faculty members and about 60 PhD students and Postdocs. He was also awarded a guest professorship at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, in 2019. Dr. Grabrucker’s major research focus is translational neuroscience in the area of Autism Spectrum Disorders, where he generates model systems to understand neurobiological processes of brain development and function. Since 2009, he has published 13 book chapters and over 58 articles in peer reviewed journals, that were cited over 2900 times. He is also author of the popular science book “Eco-Neurobiology and how the environment shapes our brain” and the first textbook about trace metal research in autism entitled “Biometals in Autism Spectrum Disorders”

Jan Gründemann is a systems and circuit neuroscientist with a strong interest in the encoding of multisensory stimuli and internal states. His lab uses deep brain imaging techniques to reveal the coding principles that underly sensory integration, neural plasticity and subsequent behavioural adaptation. Jan obtained his PhD from University College London, UK and was a postdoc and Ambizione Fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland. He is now a group leader at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Bonn, Germany and a SNF Professor at the University of Basel.  

Judith Homberg, currently professor in Translational Neuroscience, did her PhD in 2004 at the VU Medical Center in Amsterdam. Her thesis focused on individual differences in vulnerability to drug addiction. As postdoc at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht she generated and characterized the first knockout rats worldwide.  After obtaining a personal grant he moved to the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen to establish her own research group. Her group focusses on (serotonin-dependent) individual differences in behaviour and susceptibility to neurodevelopmental and stress-related disorders. She has strong expertise in behavioural neuroscience and bridges fundamental and clinical research. She obtained Young Investigator prizes from the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society and the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society, and several prestigious national and EU-funded grants. She is (co)-author of more than 180 articles, and published in amongst others Translational, Biological and Molecular Psychiatry, Cerebral Cortex, Neuroscience Biobehavioral Reviews, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience and Nature Genetics.

Maja Jagodic completed her MSc degree at the University of Belgrade, Serbia in Molecular Biology and Physiology specializing in Experimental Medicine in 1999. She then moved to Sweden where she obtained her PhD degree at the Karolinska Institutet studying genetic predisposition to autoimmune diseases in model organisms in 2004. After thesis defense, she spent a year at the Karolinska Institutet gaining skills in human genetics. Already towards the end of her PhD thesis, Maja became fascinated by the field of epigenetics. Epigenetic mechanisms, that orchestrate genome activity in response to environmental cues, were at that time strongly implicated in the etiology of complex inflammatory diseases but virtually unexplored. Maja was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to study epigenetic mechanisms in cancer at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2008, she was awarded an Assistant Professor position by the Swedish Research Council and she returned to Sweden to initiate studies of epigenetic mechanisms in Multiple Sclerosis. She was appointed a group leader position at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet in 2012 and she became an Associate Professor in Experimental Medicine in 2014. Her research group continues to utilize functional genetic approaches to study mechanisms underlying chronic inflammation in the brain with a focus on Multiple Sclerosis and its experimental models.

Professor Jacek Jemielity leads a research group at the Centre of New Technologies, Division of Biophysics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw. His research is focused on the chemical synthesis, properties and applications of modified nucleotides and nucleic acids. He recently worked on mRNA degradation processes mediated by the Dcp1 / Dcp2 enzyme. Intracellular stability of mRNA directly impacts RNA-based therapeutics and vaccines. Methods developed by him are used to track the degradation of mRNA-based therapeutics and, consequently, to search for factors that slow down this process. He co-founded with other scientists from the University of Warsaw and the Medical University of Warsaw ExploRNA Therapeutics company. The company is testing the therapeutic effectiveness of new solutions for modified mRNA and to implement them in treatment.

Martin Kaczocha received his B.S. with honors degree in Pharmacology and his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Stony Brook University. His graduate work culminated in the identification of fatty acid binding proteins as intracellular carriers for endocannabinoids. Dr. Kaczocha is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, and the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the role of fatty acid binding proteins in pain, inflammation, and cancer, and his laboratory is currently developing small molecule fatty acid binding protein 5 inhibitors as therapeutics to treat chronic pain and prostate cancer.

Dr. Liubov S. Kalinichenko graduated with the M.S. degree in pharmacy from the I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University (Russia) in 2009. In 2012, she received a Ph.D. degree in medicine from the P.K. Anokhin Institute of Normal Physiology (Russia) for her research on the role of cytokines in the regulation of oxidative and antioxidant processes in the rat brain during acute emotional stress. In 2017, she was also awarded a Ph.D. degree in neuroscience from the University Clinic Erlangen (Germany) for the investigation of the role of acid sphingomyelinase in depression/anxiety-induced alcohol addiction. This work got the Shimon Gatt Award in 2019. Since 2017, Dr. Kalinichenko is working as a postdoctoral scientist in the University Clinic Erlangen. Her primary research interests include the involvement of lipids in the mechanisms of depression-induced alcohol addiction.

Johannes Kirchmair is an associate professor in cheminformatics at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the University of Vienna. After earning his PhD from the University of Innsbruck (2007), Johannes started his career as an application scientist at Inte:Ligand GmbH (Vienna). In 2010 he joined BASF SE (Ludwigshafen) as a postdoctoral research fellow. Thereafter he worked as a research associate at the University of Cambridge (2010-2013) and ETH Zurich (2013-2014). Johannes held a junior professorship in applied bioinformatics at the University of Hamburg (2014 to 2018) and an associate professorship in bioinformatics at the University of Bergen (2018 to 2019). He has been a visiting professor or lecturer at the National Institute of Warangal (2016), the University of Cagliari (2017) and the University of Vienna (2018). His main research interests include the development and application of computational methods for the prediction of the biological activities, metabolic fate and toxicity of small molecules in the context of drug discovery.

Ewelina Knapska obtained MSc degrees in biology and psychology from the University of Warsaw. In 2001 she started working with Tomasz Werka and Leszek Kaczmarek, studying the heterogeneity of the amygdala in control of positive and negative emotions. After obtaining her PhD from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS in 2006, Ewelina moved to Ann Arbor, USA for a postdoc in the laboratory of Prof. Stephen Maren at the University of Michigan, where she studied mechanisms of fear extinction. She moved back to Poland in 2008, getting a stipend from the Foundation for Polish Science and becoming an assistant professor at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS. In 2012, she obtained habilitation (DSc) and became an associate professor and the head of the newly created Laboratory of Neurobiology of Emotions. In 2016 she received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for studying the role of the amygdala in control of socially transferred emotions. Since 2018 she is Vice-President of Centre of Excellence for Neural Plasticity and Brain Disorders (BRAINCITY) in the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology.

A graduate (biotechnology) of the University of Silesia of Katowice, PhD (medical science) at the Maj Institute of Pharmacology, PAS. Currently employed at the Institute of Pharmacology, where he is conducting research in the Department of Molecular Neuropharmacology. Main research interests: gene expression regulation in the brain, genome-based treatment personalization, and genetics of complex behavioral traits and diseases. Research experience: analysis and interpretation of gene expression alterations obtained using high-throughput methods, animal and cellular models of disorders of the nervous system, and molecular profiling of psychotropic drugs. In the last few years, he has been involved in the analysis of genome-sequencing data from patients with rare diseases. He has been the principal investigator of several completed research grants and R&D projects, (co-) author of 91 publications cited 1584 times, H-index 22. He is the Field Editor of the Pharmacological Research journal.

Since 1997, his group has dissected the diverse functions of endocannabinoid system and the cannabinoid CB1 receptor in different cell types and organ systems, by using the Cre/loxP system in mouse. Thereby, they have made major contributions to the mechanistic understanding of this lipid signaling system in fear and anxiety circuits, in stress coping, in neuroprotection and in the regulation of the brain’s neuronal excitability, in the fine-tuned regulation of synaptic transmission and homeostatic processes, and in neural development. They found a dichotomic function of CB1 receptor in the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory neurons in signaling, synaptic transmission and behavioral regulation. They furthermore contributed to the mechanistic underpinnings on how cannabinoids and endocannabinoid degradation inhibitors employ their effects, thus, promoted our insights into the beneficial and adversive effects of cannabinoids in health and disease, an important current issue in society.

His research fueled many other aspects of endocannabinoid research, whereby they have crucially been involved in. These studies include: olfactory perception, pain perception, spasticity in multiple sclerosis mouse models and the therapeutic potential of cannabis in this neurodegenerative disease, cannabis actions / endocannabinoid fuctions on neural developmentin endocannabinoid functions in several peripheral organs, including liver, involvement in the regulation of energy balance and feeding, discovery of CB1 receptor in mitochondria, discovery of novel endocannabinoid-like compounds, such as pepcan and lipoxin A4.

In summary, Prof. Lutz has given numerous novel insights into this body’s signaling system, and his discoveries have had important impacts on the field of endocannabinoid research, but also on neurosciences and physiology in general.

Adrian Newman-Tancredi, PhD, DSc, is a researcher with over 25 years’ experience of neuroscience drug discovery and early development. He is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of a bioscience company, Neurolixis, developing clinical-stage drugs for treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. Previously, he was Director of Neurobiology drug discovery at Pierre Fabre Laboratories, identifying novel antipsychotic, antidepressant and analgesic drug candidates. Prior to Pierre Fabre, Adrian Newman-Tancredi characterized the serotonergic properties of atypical antipsychotics and antiparkinsonian drugs and investigated signal transduction of monoamine receptors at the Servier Research Institute. Dr Newman-Tancredi has published over 180 articles in peer-reviewed journals, is co-inventor on a dozen patents and serves as European Councilor for the International Society for Serotonin Research. His principal current focus is the development of the first-in-class serotonergic ‘biased agonists’ befiradol (NLX-112) and NLX-101 (F15599), having previously characterized several approved drugs, including milnacipran (Savella ®), piribedil (Trivastal ®), agomelatine (Valdoxan ®) and levomilnacipran (Fetzima ®).

Virology, Antiviral Drug & Vaccine Research, Rega Institute for Medical Research, Department of Microbiology, Immunology & Transplantation, Faculty of Medicine, University of Leuven, Belgium

Johan Neyts is full professor of Virology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He teaches virology at the medical school and at the school of dentistry.  His lab has a long-standing expertise in the development of antivirals strategies and drugs against emerging and neglected viral infections such as dengue and other flaviviruses, Chikungunya and other alphaviruses, enteroviruses, noroviruses, HEV and rabies and is intensively involved in the search for antiviral strategies against SARS-CoV2.  A second focus of the lab is the development of a novel vaccine technology platform technology based on the yellow fever virus vaccine as a vector; this include among others vaccines against rabies and SARS-CoV2.  His team is also developing a technology, the PLLAV (Plasmid Launched Live Attenuated Virus); which allows to rapidly engineer highly thermostable vaccines against multiple viral pathogens. Johan is past-president of the International Society for Antiviral Research (www.isar-icar.com).  Four classes of antivirals discovered in his laboratory have been licensed to major pharmaceutical companies (two on HCV, one on dengue and one on rhino/enteroviruses). He published >520 papers in peer reviewed journals and has given ~240 invited lectures and provides content to a larger audience via lay-press.

www.antivirals.be

https://twitter.com/neyts_johan

www.facebook.com/NeytsLab

www.twitter.com/neytsvirology

ORCID  0000-0002-0033-7514 –  Researcher ID :  U-8267-2017

Nicholas Pintori, MSc, PhD is a Post Doctoral researcher at the Neuropsychopharmacology division of the University in Cagliari. Nicholas Pintori is author of more than 10 publications in International Scientific Journals and Books, and his main research interest involves the study of the neurochemical, behavioral, and glial alterations induced by repeated exposure to synthetic cannabinoids, in particular JWH-018, and other classes of the so-called “novel psychoactive substances”. Other lines of research involve the study of the mechanism underlying the addiction, specifically the reactivation and the reconsolidation of maladaptive memories in rodents with a history of food or drug self-administration, and the study of the effect of enriched environment on food and drugs relapse in rodents.

A graduate of the Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology of the University of Gdańsk and the Medical University of Gdańsk. He earned a doctorate in pharmacy in 2002. Following his doctorate he worked at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University and at the Department of Genetics at the University of Alabama. Since 2017 he has served as prorector for research at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Department of Laboratory Medicine at GUMed. His principal field of research is somatic mosaicism and structural rearrangements of the genome in the context of cancers and rare genetic diseases.

Head of the Department of Medical Genetics of the Medical University of Warsaw. His research interest is related to the search for novel monogenic human disease.

Krzysztof Pyrć is full professor of Virology at Jagiellonian University Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology. Studied in University of Amsterdam and at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His work on NL63 coronavirus was awarded from the Dutch Society of Infectious Diseases and the Glaxo company. He established Biosecurity Level 3 research facility leads Virogenetics research team. Works on viral infections of the respiratory system, especially on research models and pathogen detection. After the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic, he headed the team conducting research on the virus at the Malopolska Center of Biotechnology. A member of the advisory team of the minister of science and higher education “on activities related to the prevention, counteraction and combating of COVID-19” Deputy Chairman of the COVID-19 Advisory Team to the President of the Polish Academy of Sciences and member of the Science Against Pandemic initiative.

Didier Rognan heads the Laboratory of Therapeutic Innovation (LIT) at the Faculty of Pharmacy of Strasbourg (France). He studied Pharmacy at the University of Rennes (France) and did a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry in Strasbourg (France) under the supervision of Prof. C.G. Wermuth. After a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen (Germany, supervisor PD. Dr. G. Folkers), he moved as an Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Supervisor: Prof. G. Folkers) until October 2000. He was then appointed Research Director at the CNRS to build a new laboratory in Strasbourg. Dr. Rognan is scientific consultant for several pharmaceutical companies (e.g. Lilly, Sanofi, Servier, Solvay) and has created two start-up (IDEALP Pharma, medchem CRO) and BIODOL Therapeutics (innovative treatment of chronic pain). He is mainly interested in all aspects of structure-based design and synthesis of bioactive compounds.

Prof. Janusz K. Rybakowski was the Head of Department of Adult Psychiatry, Poznan University of Medical Sciences, 1995-2016, the Chairman, Department of Psychiatry, Medical Academy, Bydgoszcz, 1985-1995, the NIH Fogarty Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1976-1977. He was the President of the Polish Psychiatric Association, 1998-2001, a Board Member of the Association of European Psychiatrists, 1998-2004, and has been a member of ten other international scientific associations.

Prof. Rybakowski authored over 600 scientific articles on clinical psychiatry, neurobiology, and psychopharmacology, present Hirsch Index 55. He is the author of the books “The Faces of Manic-Depressive Illness” (2009) and “Lithium – the Amazing Drug in Psychiatry” (2020). He has been a member of the Editorial Board of 16 international journals. He is the only Polish psychiatrist among the top 2% scientists, according to recent report by the Stanford University and Elsevier.                                        

In 2012,  Prof. Rybakowski received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Bipolar Forum, in 2015, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Biological Psychiatry of the World Federation of the Societies of Biological Psychiatry, and in 2018, the Mogens Schou scientific award of the International Society of Bipolar Disorders.

György M. Keserű obtained his Ph.D. at Budapest, Hungary. He worked for Sanofi and in then moved to Gedeon Richter. Since 2007 he was appointed as the Head of Discovery Chemistry. He contributed to the discovery of the antipsychotic Vraylar® (cariprazine) that has been approved and marketed from 2016 in US and EU. He served as a director general of the Research Centre for Natural Sciences (RCNS), Hungary. From 2015 he is heading the Medicinal Chemistry Research Group at RCNS and full professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. His research interests include medicinal chemistry, drug design. György was awarded by the prestigious Overton and Meyer Award of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry and recently he has been elected as corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Marek Sanak is is a Polish geneticist and molecular biologist, professor of medical sciences, Head of the Department of Molecular Biology and Clinical Genetics of the Jagiellonian University Medical College, and the Department of Biochemical and Molecular Diagnostics at the University Hospital in Kraków. Was a co-worker with Andrzej Szczeklik in research on bronchial asthma. Studied exacerbations of asthma caused by viral infections. Is active academic teacher. Together with Krzysztof Pyrć member of extramural advisory committee since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic.

Specialist in clinical genetics and laboratory diagnostics, professor of medical sciences, Head of the Department and Department of Genetics of the Medical University in Wrocław, in 2014–2019 she was National Consultant for Clinical Genetics in Poland.

Specialist in psychiatry, head of the Department of Affective Disorders at the Chair of Psychiatry, Jagiellonian University Medical College. Co-founder and deputy editor-in-chief of the journal “Medycyna Praktyczna – Psychiatria”. Deputy head of the Clinical Department of Adult, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Krakow University Hospital. Member of the Therapeutic Committee of the Krakow University Hospital. Author and co-author of nearly 200 articles and 10 books, related to his main scientific and research interests, which include: pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatment of affective disorders, side effects and drug interactions in psychopharmacotherapy, neuropsychiatry, and the relationship between pain and mental disorders.

Graduate of Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Psychologist during MSc studies in Neuroscience and a coprehensive Psychotherapy training at Jagiellonian University Medical College. PhD candidate and a researcher in a project „Bio-inspired artificial neural networks”, where she analyzes resting-state fMRI data from patients with Multiple Sclerosis. Her scientific interests include investigating functional brain network architecture of psychiatric and neurological patients as well as searching for a suicide biomarker.

Nicola Simola, MSc, PhD is Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Nicola Simola is author of more than 80 publications in International Scientific Journals and Books, and his main research interest is the neuropharmacology of dopaminomimetic drugs in experimental rodent models of human disease, focusing on the effects that these drugs have on the emotional state, evaluated by measuring the emission of ultrasonic vocalizations, a behavioral marker of affect. Another line of research involves the study of the neurotoxic and neuroinflammatory effects that can be elicited by amphetamine-like psychostimulants and by the so-called “novel psychoactive substances”.

Rebecca Strawbridge is a post-doctoral research associate within the Centre for Affective Disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (King’s College London). Her research ambitions include enhancing the predictability of response to multidisciplinary treatments for depression and developing personalised and/or stratified treatment approaches. Other strong areas of interest include inflammatory markers of treatment-resistance and more broadly the role of biomarkers in mood disorders as well as cognitive remediation approaches and the assessment of cognitive function.

Professor Zbigniew Szewczuk is a group leader of the Chemistry and Stereochemistry of Peptides and Proteins group of the Faculty of Chemistry University of Wrocław (Poland). His research is focused on the design, chemical synthesis and analysis of peptides and their analogs.

Zbigniew Szewczuk is the author of over 200 scientific publications. His current research focuses on the design, synthesis and analysis of new methods of derivatization of molecular biomarkers to facilitate their analysis by mass spectrometry.

Roza Szweda since 2009 was working in CPMW Polish Academy of Sciences as research assistant, and in 2015 received her PhD form AGH University of Science and Technology, Karkow, Poland. After, she moved to Strasbourg, France where she was working as postdoctoral researcher at Institute Charles Sadron CNRS and project manager at Institute of Supramolecular Science and Engineering of Strasbourg University. Since November 2019 she has started her independent research as a Leader of Functional Macromolecules Group at Łukasiewicz Research Network – PORT Polish Center for Technology Development, Wroclaw, Poland. Her research is focused on precise polymer chemistry and applications of macromolecules in complex materials.

Born in 1961, Łukasz Święcki graduated from the Joachim Lelewel High School in Warsaw. He was awarded the first prize in the 1980 National Matriculation Competition in the Polish language. Święcicki graduated from the Medical Academy of Warsaw (now Medical University of Warsaw), Faculty of Medicine, in 1986. Having completed the postgraduate internship in the Bielański Hospital in Warsaw, he started working in the Second Department of Psychiatry in the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology. Święcicki became a specialist in psychiatry in 1993. In 1995, he defended his PhD on B12 avitaminosis and folic acid deficiency in patients with psychiatric disorders. In 2008, Święcicki obtained his habilitation (DSc) on the basis of the monograph on seasonal depression and light therapy. In 2016, Łukasz Święcicki received the title of Professor of Medicine from the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda. In the years 2006-2015, Święcicki headed the Department of Affective Disorders in the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology and from 2016 to 2020 he headed the Second Department of Psychiatry. Since 2020, Professor Święcicki has been a medical consultant to the Second Department of Psychiatry.

Professor Łukasz Święcicki has published over 400 research studies in national and international peer-reviewed journals; he has also written 20 books on, among others, treating both depression and bipolar affective disorder. He is also the author of numerous studies on biological, non-pharmacological treatment methods of affective disorders (ECT, rTMS, DBS, light therapy). Apart from his professional interests, Professor Święcicki is also a columnist, poet, translator and blogger. Last but not least, he is the husband of one wife, father of four offspring and grandfather of, so far, ten grandchildren.

Paul Willner is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Swansea University, UK. He studied at Oxford University for an undergraduate degree in psychology and physiology, followed by a doctorate in behavioural neuroscience and the award thirty years later of the higher degree of Doctor of Science. He is past president of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society and founding Editor of the journal Behavioural Pharmacology, as well as being a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and an Honorary Consultant Clinical Psychologist in the UK National Health Service. His research, which has investigated a wide range of clinical and preclinical topics, includes a 40-year interest in depression and mechanisms of antidepressant action. A sabbatical year at University of California San Diego in the early 1980s produced a monograph, Depression, A Psychobiological Synthesis, and an influential review of animal models of depression, that led, a few years later, to the development of the chronic mild stress (CMS) model of depression, which is considered by many to represent the gold standard for animal models of psychiatric disorders. The CMS procedure has recently been adapted to provide a model of treatment-resistant depression, which is being used in current research to understand the neural mechanisms underlying non-response to antidepressant treatment.

Markus Wöhr, Dr. rer. nat. (PhD), is a psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist, presently working as Professor for Biological Psychology and Behavioral Pharmacology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Belgium. He is the head of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Research Group. Markus Wöhr has a broad background in animal behavior and translational research models for neuropsychiatric dysfunctions, with specific training and expertise in behavioral neuroscience of affective and neurodevelopmental disorders. His main research interests include neurobiological mechanisms underlying social behavior, acoustic communication through ultrasonic vocalizations, and socio-affective information processing in rodents.