EES25-04 — EMBO | EMBL Symposium Infection: pathogens, hosts, and microbiomes

Infectious diseases are among the most prevalent causes of human illness and death in the world. Epidemics & pandemics have shaped human evolution and history, and although for a while there were considered a solved problem for the developed world, the recent past has showed us all why this is not the case. Antimicrobial resistance, global warming, human population size increase, modern lifestyles (urbanization, traveling), decrease of wild-life habitats for pathogen reservoirs all contribute to creating an ideal setting for infectious diseases becoming an even greater challenge in the future. This symposium will bring together experts working on different pathogens (viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites) and who rarely meet. It will cover a broad range of topics on the host-pathogen interface, highlighting the diversity in mechanisms and the convergence of strategies pathogens use to invade, hijack host machineries, proliferate within the host, cause disease and spread to other hosts. Infection biologists using systems biology, population genomics, genetics, cell and tissue biology, biochemistry and structural biology will meet to present the state-of-the-art of different fields. The emerging realisation that infections are often polymicrobial, pathogens can be opportunistic and can already reside for years as benign in our body, and that the microbiome can greatly impact infection onset and progress will provide a common thread of discussion across fields of different pathogenic agents. Discussions will fertilise transfer of technologies and know-how across fields, and set the ground for developing new strategies to tackle current bottlenecks in our ability to treat infections.