Chaired by Prof. Imed Gallouzi

During this session, I will delve into our current endeavors, with a special focus on movement disorders and autism. Through this lens, I'll present the intricate balance of harnessing algorithms while emphasizing transparency, equity, and practical relevance.

Chaired by Dr. Damien Lightfoot

Our cancer classifiers open a new frontier in using the precision of glycan expression patterns to diagnose cancer because, as we demonstrate, a subset of GT genes are almost universally present as the disease spreads, and therefore have a functional role in cancer’s destructiveness.

In this presentation we discuss the development of new hybrid organic-inorganic solution-processed materials and low-cost manufacturing methods to enable arbitrarily-shaped scintillators for conformal X-ray imaging.

The presentation will highlight our recent developments to overcome such challenges for various biomedical related analytes. We developed various optical, electrochemical, colorimetric sensing platforms and integrated them with various natural and synthetic recognition receptors.

Our unique iPSC cohort represents an ideal platform to investigate the molecular and cellular impact of X overdosage during early development and could serve as a clonal cellular model for probing X inactivation dynamics during prolonged stem cell differentiation in vitro

In the realm of oncogene target validation and dynamics-structure-based targeted drug design, our research focuses on H3K36 methyltransferases (KMTs) and transcription factors belonging to the BTB family. Through our investigations on KMTs, we have made significant contributions in the field of lung cancer by identifying novel oncogenes, their recurrent missense mutations, and elucidating the molecular bases of their hyperactivity that drive cancerous transformations.

I will discuss our recent study that investigated the contribution of early thalamic inputs onto L1 interneurons for the establishment of top-down connectivity in the primary visual cortex. We found that bottom-up thalamic inputs predominate during L1 development and preferentially target neurogliaform cells.

Advancement of radar-based technologies designed for monitoring vital signs, including heartbeat, and breathing rate, along with underlying heart and chest expansion

For all conference participants. Please confirm attendance by contacting Caterina Carna (caterina.carna@kaust.edu.sa)

This talk will unveil a readily-available, online, and no-code system that eases the burden of developing and deploying such models for real-world applications. This system was innovated by a KAUST spin-off startup called Thya Technology.

Chaired by Dr. Fadwa Attiga, KSHI Health Initiative head, KAUST

To address this shortcoming, researchers in both academia and industry started working on designing innovative encapsulation or delivery platforms for biologics especially after the recent pandemic.

How ChatGPT-like frameworks can be developed to solve open problems in biomedicine, through the introduction of some of our recent works

This talk introduces two platforms for rapid and amplification-free electrochemical detection of microRNA based on bespoke peptide nucleic acid (PNA) probe-functionalized 2D nanomaterials. PNAs are synthetic oligonucleotides that offer greater thermodynamic stability, specificity, and resistance to degradation compared to their natural counterparts.

Here, we characterize the disease's first viable transgenic mouse model and also analyze the molecular impact of the VMAT2 mutations in silico to understand the pathophysiology better and potentially improve treatment approaches.

Chaired by Prof. Arnab Pain

Our effort aims to demonstrate the ability to monitor for a wide suite of microbial contaminants associated with global travellers, which would facilitate relevant stakeholders to devise appropriate intervention measures that can minimize unintended dissemination of microbial threats.

We demonstrate a miniaturized imager-based platform capable of super-resolution displacement spectroscopic sensing for specific biomedical applications

Our further studies show that CLN3 is required for the lysosomal egress of GPDs. We believe that the LysoIP workflow and its compatibility with multi-omic analyses will further elucidate the complex functions of lysosomes in disease and physiology.

The increasing popularity of machine learning models in real-world clinical decision support systems has underscored the need for assessing and then mitigating biases that may manifest, often spuriously, in their predictions either at the population or sub-population level.

Development of a miniaturized wearable ECG monitoring system that is small, lightweight, and low-cost. Our innovative system comprises fully printed gentle-to-skin ECG electrodes, and a scaled-down printed circuit board (PCB) packaged inside a 3D-printed antenna-on-package (AoP).

Presentation of a recent genomic survey to demonstrate the emergence of hypervirulent and multidrug-resistant clones within the Saudi clinical setting at a high resolution.

Our work unveils novel, unanticipated physiological mechanistic roles of retrotransposon noncoding RNA in adaptive resilience and aims at the exploration of RNA based potential therapeutic strategies to ameliorate aging and related pathologies.

I will be focusing on KSHI-funded projects on COVID-19 and Dengue in Saudi Arabia under the umbrella of the KSHI. In addition, I will be presenting our recent and ongoing studies on the role of the Nucleocapsid protein mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 severity. All these projects involve active collaborations with several healthcare institutions within the KSA and the Saudi MOH regional research laboratories.

Our results against Beta-CoVs, including notably NeoCoV, can now be of guiding towards the design and development of a Universal Beta-CoVs Vaccine considering the knowledge of antigenic regions from Spike and other structural proteins we recover from available cross-neutralizing antibodies in the human serum samples we tested.

Brief overview of the project’s progress and current status and discuss the potential impact of what could be the first COVID-19 vaccine developed within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.