Meetings

Immune Function Monitoring
in Clinical Trials Satellite Symposia
June 11, 2009
1:00 - 4:30 pm
San Francisco, CA

This year's Immune Function Monitoring in Clinical Trials Satellite Symposia was co-organized by the Clinical Immunology Society (CIS) and the Immunotoxicology Technical Committee of ILSI/HESI. The Satellite was held on June 11, 2009, in San Francisco, California in conjunction with the FOCIS Annual Meeting.

Target Audience
The target audience for this program was intended for clinical immunologists and clinicians from academia, government or industry with interests in testing immune function in humans and/or interests in the development of testing methods that could be used for clinical immune function monitoring.

Objectives
The primary objective of this meeting was to increase the awareness of the current testing paradigms used for immune function monitoring in clinical trials and the opportunities and challenges for the development and application of better approaches. At the conclusion of this symposium, the attendees had a strong understand the following:

• The drug development process (non-clinical and clinical) with particular emphasis on immunomodulatory drugs;
• The challenges that industry and investigators face in assessing immune function in clinical trials (intended or unintended). What types of assays are needed for the future;
• Practical considerations with the implementation of immune function assays in clinical trials;
• The potential use and challenges with vaccine immunization studies to assess immune function;
• The challenges in the translation of immune function data in humans to assessing risk for infections.