מרצים אורחים

Dr. Verkman has worked in CF research for more than 25 years, and directs CF programs at the University of California, San Francisco funded by the NIH and CF Foundation.  His interest in CF research is in the development of new drug strategies and in studies of CF lung disease mechanisms.  Dr. Verkman was responsible for the original idea for potentiators and correctors of mutant CFTRs in the late 1990s, for which he received the inaugural Robert J. Beall CF Therapeutics Development Award in 2015. Dr. Verkman has continued in CF research, with recent focus on drug development for CF patients with hard-to-treat mutations, including W1282X, that cannot be treated with current CFTR modulators.

Kors van der Ent (1962) is paediatrician and Professor in Paediatric Pulmonology. After medical training in Rotterdam and Utrecht he became a research fellow at the department of Paediatric Respiratory Diseases where he graduated in 1997 on a thesis on clinical and physiological aspects of tidal breathing analysis as a measure for airway obstruction in young infants. In 2000 he became head of the department of Paediatric Respiratory Diseases and Allergology and was appointed as professor since 2007. Since 2015 he is the Scientific Director of the Child Health Program of the University Medical Center Utrecht

The research interests of Kors focuses on bronchusobstructive diseseases in young children, like Cystic Fibrosis and Primary Ciliary Diskenesia. The studies crosslink basic mechanisms and infections in patients with lung disesea with long term developmental studies in several birth cohorts of healthy infants. This program includes both mechanistic studies in collaboration with the Hubrecht lab and the Byvoet Center as well as studies into host pathogen interaction in collaboration with the veterinary faculty of the Utrecht University. Clinical studies are performed in close collaboration with other pediatric pulmonology centres throughout Europe. He chairs the CF-subnetwork of the European Reference Network Lung. Prof Van der Ent published over 200 national and international peer reviewed scientific papers and acted as promoter in 20 theses. Currently he supervises 3 post-docs and 14 PhD students, all working on mechanisms in the development and treatment of cystic fibrosis and other bronchusobstructive diseases. His research is funded by the European Union (H2020) and national governmental (ZonMW, University Funds) and non-governmental bodies (Patient Health Funds, Pharmaceuical Industries), He chairs the national Cystic Fibrosis Research Network and is in the board of many national and international committees regarding respiratory diseases.

Dr. Solomon completed his medical training at the University of Alabama school of Medicine. He then began work in CF during his research and clinical training in internal medicine at UAB hospital. After completing internal medicine residency, he completed a personalized therapeutics in CF, Dr. Solomon returned as a research and clinical fellowship at the University of Colorado/National Jewish Health pulmonary fellowship program in Denver, CO. After a three year fellowship studying methods of research fellow to UAB. He has been an assistant professor of medicine since 2014 in the division of pulmonary, allergy, and critical care medicine at UAB. He is an associate scientist studying mechanisms of mucociliary clearance and personalized therapeutics in the Gregory Fleming James CF research Center and is the director of the CF and non-CF Bronchiectasis Clinical Program at UAB Hospital and Clinics

Background

Dr. Garry R. Cutting is a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  He is the Aetna/U.S. Healthcare Professor of Medical Genetics at Johns Hopkins and is also a faculty member of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine. His areas of clinical expertise include cystic fibrosis and medical genetics. 

Dr. Cutting’s primary research interest is in the molecular genetics of cystic fibrosis and, more recently, elucidating modifier genes underlying variation in the severity of cystic fibrosis. He is also the director of the CFTR2 project, a worldwide collection of genotype and phenotype data on almost 90,000 patients with cystic fibrosis. 

After receiving his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Connecticut, Dr. Cutting earned his medical degree from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He completed his residency training in pediatrics and a fellowship in medical genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has remained at Johns Hopkins for his entire professional career. 

Dr. Cutting is the recipient of the Paul di Sant’Agnese Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles. He is director of the postdoctoral clinical genetics fellowship programs, the DNA Diagnostic Laboratory and the Genetic Translational Technology Core at Johns Hopkins.  In April 2017 Dr. Cutting was elected to the Association of American Physicians.

Expertise

Cystic Fibrosis, Genetics, Medical Genetics

Research Interests

Determining the biological role of the CFTR protein by identifying mutations in patients with CF characterization of CFTR transcripts and protein from patients of various genotypes and analysis of chloride conduction properties of mutated CFTR expressed in various cell types.  Dr. Cutting’s laboratory is in the forefront of interpreting the functional and clinical consequences of DNA variants that cause CF.  Furthermore, the laboratory determines the response of genetic variants of CFTR to small molecule modulators that are in clinical use as well as compounds under investigation for clinical applications.

Dr. Cutting’s laboratory is a leader in identification and characterization of genetic modifiers of CF and his group is engaged with teams at University of N. Carolina and University of Washington State Seattle in performing whole genome sequencing to identify common and rare modifier variants of disease severity in CF.