On 12th November, CAMS held the second “Mitochondrial Biology & Toxicology Research Day” at Granta Park in Cambridge. The meeting followed on from the successful Mitochondrial Toxicity workshop in 2017, with the aim of recognising key gaps in the current industrial approach to mitochondrial testing and identifying l areas for potential collaborations and funding opportunities to address these gaps.
The day was jointly organised by AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and the MRC Tox Unit, and was well attended by both academic and industrial experts in the mitochondrial biology field. Experts from across industry gave informative presentations and discussed case studies highlighting the key gaps in the current approach to mitochondrial toxicity testing. There was a great key note presentation my Margaret Ashcroft and AZ and GSK sponsored students from the MRC Tox Unit highlighted their work with posters and short pitches over lunch which set delegates’ mitochondria to work to energise scientists for the following sessions.
In the afternoon four productive work group sessions took place with the following themes;
1) Scope out potential for CAMS Mito II group to connect with existing funding and collaboration opportunities in the IMI 2 group.
2) Identify key gaps in the industry approach to mitochondrial toxicity using the case studies presented today and seek potential approaches to close them.
3) Resolve the conundrum of non-standardised mito-annotations.
These workgroup sessions saw extensive and passionate discussions between all attendees. Watch this space for the further outcomes of this meeting, hopefully more collaborations and publications to come.
If you would like to hear more about the outcomes of this meeting please contact Amy Wilson at: alw91@cam.ac.uk
