Gunnar C. Hansson, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor in University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has been working on mucus, mucins, and mucin glycans his whole career, focusing on the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts. He has been part of and at the leading edge of developing molecular understanding of mucins over the last 30 years with a focus on their biosynthesis and structure. He and his team discovered that an attached colon mucus layer impenetrable to bacteria separates commensal bacteria from the host and that the chronically diseased lungs are covered with a similar type of mucus. They have studied and discovered that goblet cells making the mucus are more specialized and diverse than previously appreciated. The studied structural variability of glycans on the mucins and their mucin domains are important for commensal bacteria selection and bacterial utilization as a nutritional source. He has founded the Mucin Biology Groups constellation with a total of seven PIs working in the area at the University of Gothenburg (www.medkem.gu.se/mucinbiology).

---

Professor Ludger Johannes is Research Director (DRE) at INSERM. He is a member of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German organization of the academically gifted), Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and German Academy of Science — Leopoldina. At Institut Curie, he has been heading since 2001 the Traffic, Signaling, and Delivery Team, member of the excellence initiative Cell(n)Scale. Since January 2014, he has directed the Cellular and Chemical Biology unit. His research aims at establishing fundamental concepts of endocytosis and intracellular trafficking. The Johannes team has discovered the membrane trafficking interface between early endosomes and the Golgi apparatus, and demonstrated that lectin-induced glycolipid reorganization acts as a driving force in clathrin-independent endocytosis (termed the GlycoLipid-Lectin / GL-Lect hypothesis). The studies of the Johannes team have been published in highly visible international journals, including Cell and Nature. Between 2014-2020, he was the holder of an ERC advanced grant. He also aims at exploiting the discoveries of his team for the development of innovative cancer therapy strategies using the B-subunit of Shiga toxin (STxB) as a "pilot" for the delivery of therapeutic compounds to precise intracellular locations of dendritic cells for immunotherapy, and to tumors for targeted therapy.

---

Celso A Reis is the Head of the Glycobiology in Cancer group at i3S-Institute for Research and Innovation in Health, University of Porto, Portugal. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of i3S and on the Board of IGO. He is a Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of Porto, and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto. Celso A Reis has published 227 peer-reviewed papers with over 15400 citations and with an H-index of 56 (Scopus). He is the author of several book chapters and patents. Currently, he leads an international multidisciplinary team working on glycobiology in human diseases focusing on cancer. His lab investigates the molecular mechanisms controlling glycosylation in cancer and the role of glycans during carcinogenesis and tumor progression. He has made several contributions to the development of novel strategies to improve cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and patient stratification. These include the studies on the role of glycosyltransferases regulating the biosynthesis of several glycans involved in cancer, such as those controlling critical steps on mucin-type O-glycosylation and N-glycosylation, with impact in cancer invasion and metastasis, as well as the tumor microenvironment.

---

Dr. Drickamer began working in the field of glycan-binding receptors as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. These receptors have been the focus of his subsequent research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Oxford University, and currently at Imperial College London. His work on identifying a common carbohydrate recognition led to the definition of C-type lectins as one of the major groups of glycan-binding receptors. His ongoing research is a joint project with Dr. Maureen Taylor. The aim is to develop a broad understanding of the biological roles of sugar recognition. They have used a combination of biochemical, biophysical, and molecular biological approaches to understand how carbohydrate-recognition domains provide selective recognition of glycoproteins and cell surfaces. In addition, they seek to determine how such recognition leads to the targeting of biological functions, such as innate immunity to pathogens, clearance of serum glycoproteins, cell adhesion, and cell signaling, and how genetic variation in sugar-binding receptors causes changes in their molecular properties and hence contributes to human disease. Dr. Taylor and Dr. Drickamer co-authored the textbook Introduction to Glycobiology, designed to introduce the field to students and researchers from other disciplines.

 

---

Dr. Avery Posey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He received Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2011) and his postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a classically trained molecular and developmental geneticist and an expert in the development and pre-clinical characterization of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and other engineered T cell strategies for cancer immunotherapy. His current research is focused on the redirection of T cells to target cancer-specific epitopes, especially glycan haptens and O-glycopeptide epitopes formed through altered glycosylation in cancer cells, investigation of optimal CAR-T signaling for effective anti-tumor responses and durable persistence in solid tumors, and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene-editing strategies for improved engineered T cells (knockout of checkpoint molecules - PD-1, CTLA-4, etc.; HDR knock-in of combination therapies). The major objective of his research is to increase the efficacy of engineered T cells in solid tumors.

---

Dr. Heinz Läubli received his M.D. and Ph.D. at the Institute of Physiology, University of Zürich (Switzerland). He is now an Assistant Professor and a Research group leader at the University of Basel and an Attending physician in the Division of Oncology, and Head of Glycobiology Research in the  Department of Biomedicine, at the University Hospital Basel.
Dr. Heinz’s research interests are to improve immunotherapy for cancer patients by using translational in vitro and in vivo tumor models, performing correlative analysis of patients treated with immunotherapy, and conducting early clinical interventional trials. His group has been studying the interaction between siaologlycans and their interaction with Siglec receptors on immune cells. It has demonstrated that this pathway can be targeted to augment T-cell stimulation and tumor control. His research goals also include the improvement of cancer immunotherapy by modifying glycans in the tumor microenvironment and glycans of cellular products for adoptive cell therapies, including genetically modified T cells.
 

---

The research activity of Professor De Castro is in carbohydrate structural chemistry, and her training in this subject started during her bachelor thesis, which focused on plant polysaccharides. Since then, even though Professor De Castro continued her work on carbohydrate structural chemistry, she shifted her interests and dedicated her activity to the analysis of the bacterial membrane carbohydrate components, paying attention, but not limiting the work, to Gram-negative bacteria and lipopolysaccharides (LPSs). This work has resulted in the development of state-of-the-art chemical and spectroscopical approaches that have been later applied with success to different kinds of carbohydrates, such as those from the bacteria of the gut microbiota or those from the giant viruses. This last topic is Professor De Castro's major field of research.
Professor De Castro is the author/co-author of about 130 peer-reviewed publications, an associated Editor for the journal Carbohydrate Polymers, and a member of the editorial board of Carbohydrate Research, Glycobiology, and Polysaccharides. She fruitfully collaborates with different research institutions, such as the Department of Plant Pathology (University of Nebraska Lincoln, NE, USA) and the Structural and Genomics Information Laboratory in Marseille (France).

---

Dr. Narimatsu is an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Center for Glycomics, Ph.D. (2008, Tsukuba University, Japan). His study focuses on the structure, biosynthesis, and genetic regulation of complex carbohydrates. He received training for eight years at the glycobiology lab, Research Center for Medical Glycoscience (RCMG) in Japan. Joined a Center of Excellence in Glycomics funded by the Danish National Research Foundation at the University of Copenhagen in 2012 and contributed to developing a comprehensive and high-throughput platform for CRISPR/Cas9 gene targeting of the human glycome (GlycoCRISPR), a large library of glycoengineered cells (GlycoDisplay), a cell-based platform for the display and production of human Mucin tandem repeat (MucinDisplay). His research interests include a basic understanding of genetic regulation and biosynthesis of protein glycosylation, consequences of deficiencies in glycosylation in diseases, and biomedical applications. 

His group has taken a global "glycogenome" engineering approach to protein glycosylation and proposed a Cell-Based glycan array platform to display the human glycome–i.e., display of all human glycans on proteins, proteoglycans, and lipids. This self-renewable array is useful for discovering biological interactions involving glycans, and screening of true high-affinity interactions with glycans requires the natural biological context of specific proteins and cell surfaces.

 

---

Dr. Linda Hsieh-Wilson is a Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She was born in New York City and obtained her B.S. degree magna cum laude in chemistry from Yale University in 1990. In 1996, she received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Peter Schultz. In 1996, she moved to Rockefeller University to study neurobiology with Professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow. Hsieh-Wilson joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 2000, where she became an associate professor of chemistry in 2006 and a full professor in 2010. She was an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2005-2014, and in 2015, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Hsieh-Wilson has pioneered the application of organic chemistry to understand the roles of carbohydrates and protein glycosylation in neurobiology. Her honors include a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2000), Research Corporation Research Innovation Award (2000), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2003), Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2006), Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2008), Gill Young Investigator Award in Neuroscience (2009), and Horace S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry (2014).

 

---

Dr. Kadomatsu started his career in basic medical research after being a physician of pediatric neuroblastoma. During his graduate studies, he discovered the glycan-binding growth factor midkine. He has been researching the involvement of cancer, neurology, and inflammation. For this achievement, he received the Young Investigator Award from the Japanese Biochemical Society in 1997. 
His research with a Chinese graduate student led him to become particularly interested in the relationship between glycans and the nervous system, which has become the focus of his research. He was a representative of "Neuroglycobiology" (2011-2015), the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT). He currently represents the "Human Glycome Project," Roadmap 2020, MEXT. 
He served as the President of the Japanese Society of Carbohydrate Research, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biochemistry, and representative of the Asia/Australia/Africa region of the Advance in Neuroblastoma Research Association. He holds an honorary professorship from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.


 

---

Dr. Feldman obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the supervision of Dr. Armando Parodi. After completing his postdoctoral training in Guy Cornelis and Markus Aebi labs in Switzerland, he joined the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, as an assistant professor. In 2015 he moved to the Department of Microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, USA. The Feldman lab is interested in microbial glycobiology and bacterial pathogenesis. Dr. Feldman has pioneered the field of bacterial glycoengineering, which is a promising approach for the generation of novel bioconjugate vaccines. He has co-founded two companies (VaxAlta and Omniose) in this area. He is a world leader in studying the human pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii and the biogenesis of bacterial extracellular vesicles. Dr. Feldman is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

---