The 49th Annual Conference of Indian Immunology Society (Immunocon ’22) that concluded today at PGIMER, organized by the Departments of Translational & Regenerative Medicine and Immunopathology had a wonderfully articulated scientific programme and awards session on its last day.
The programme started with a plenary lecture by Prof. Clive Gray from University of Cape Town, South Africa. He talked extensively about maternal and infant factors that subsequently influence infant protective responses in HIV infected mothers. Gray also organized a pre-conference IUIS course that targeted to improve the abstract writing and presentation skills of students through group activities.
Plenary lecture was followed by Early career Woman Scientist Award Oration, the idea of award was conceived to felicitate those women scientists who are doing competitive science in early years of their career as independent scientists. Dr. Nupur Sharma from National Institute for Research in Reproductive and Child Health, Mumbai was selected for this award for her work on breast cancer. She is trying to explore the therapeutic candidates for the deadly form of this disease.
The highlight of today’s conference programme was the Award of excellence in research on Immune therapies. This award sponsored by Cadila Pharmaceutical Ltd. was conceived to honour the scientists for their contribution leading to development of immune therapies or vaccines for infectious diseases. Through a rigorous evaluation process, Dr. Amit Awasthi from Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad, INDIA was selected for this prestigious award. Dr. Awasthi in an oration about Metabolomic Signatures Shape the T Cell Response in active COVID-19 patients in a time dependent manner and how these observations may contribute to designing effective vaccines and adjuvants that promote innate immune responses and metabolites to induce a long-lasting anti-SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell response. He elaborated upon his ground breaking work on development of pan corona vaccine that may be protective against various SARS-Cov2 virus variants that are currently present or may emerge in future.
There were exciting talks in the field of ocular immunology emphasizing how ocular immune system behaves in covid 19 & tuberculosis patients. The last session of the conference were selected oral presentations by young scientists and students on various aspect of translational immunology. Alvina Deka (NII, Delhi), Zaigham Rizvi (THSTI, Faridabad) and Subajit Dutta (IGIB, Delhi) were awarded for the best oral presentations. The conference ended with a valedictory function to acknowledge all the hard work which had been put together for the immunocon ’22 and award session to the student delegates who presented their research as posters in the conference. Raj Kumar from Department of Biotechnology, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, Shruti Sham Kandekar from ACTREC, Tata Memorial Centre, Sramona Kar from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, SAS Nagar and Preetam Basak from PGIMER, Chandigarh got awards for the best poster presentation. Awards were also announced for pre-conference IUIS course for the students winning team included Komal Sharna, Neha Rawal, Karanveer, Krishapriya, Shubhpreet and Ayush Sharma.
The convenor chair of Immunocon ’22 – Prof. Sunil.K.Arora thanked all the members of his organizing team for all the efforts put together to make the conference successful.