Annual McGill AMR Symposium

Thursday, June 5, 2025 | 9:00 am - 4:30 pm (tentative)
In-Person | Online (Keynote only) | Registration required
Networking reception to follow

McGill’s University Centre, Ballroom, 3rd Floor
3480 McTavish St, Montreal

The McGill AMR Centre hosting its 5th Annual Symposium on Monday June 5, 2025!  We are inviting you to join this in-person event for scientific talks centered around the theme of “Novel targets and anti-infective therapeutic approaches”, flash-talks and poster presentations, networking and more! Keynote speaker will be Dr Man-Wah Tan from Genentech. 

Man-Wah Tan, PhD
Vice President and Senior Fellow, Infectious Diseases and Host-Microbe Interactions, Research Biology
Genentech, Roche Group

Bio: Dr. Man-Wah Tan’s research and leadership experience span both the industry and the academia. He is currently the Vice President and Senior Fellow at Genentech Research and Early Development based in South San Francisco, California. In his role, he heads the Infectious Diseases Therapeutic Area and Host-Microbe Interactions research. He leads the teams responsible for the discovery and development transformative therapeutics against hard-to-treat diseases and infectious agents of medical importance, with special emphasis on viral and bacterial pathogens. He also leads discovery efforts in unraveling the molecular basis of host-microbe interactions and investigations into the roles of the microbiota in health and diseases, with focus on gastrointestinal and lung diseases and immuno-oncology.

Prior to joining Genentech in 2010, Dr. Tan served on the faculty at the Genetics and Microbiology and Immunology Departments at Stanford University School of Medicine for over 10 years. Dr. Tan received his MPhil from the University of Cambridge and PhD from Harvard University. His first Principal Investigator position, prior to moving to Stanford, was as a Harvard Junior Fellow at Harvard University and Assistant in Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the recipient of multiple awards, including the National Institute of Health Director’s Award, NIH Digestive Disease Center Award, V Foundation Scholar Award and Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Award. At Genentech, he has contributed to the discovery of 1 FDA-approved medicine and 6 other clinical assets that span diverse therapeutic modalities: monoclonal antibody, antibody-antibiotic conjugate, and small molecule antibiotics.

Talk title: Expanding the chemical space for novel antibiotics to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR)

Abstract: The rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major threat to modern medicine, with 1.27 million deaths attributed to it in 2019. Factors like the lack of novel chemical classes of antibiotics and poor antibiotic development returns contribute to the problem. One way to address AMR is to develop novel antibiotics that have low intrinsic resistance and are unaffected by pre-existing resistance mechanisms. In this lecture, I will discuss our efforts to expand the chemical space to identify novel antibiotics by a combination of several approaches: a) fully access natural biosynthesis diversity through metagenomic exploration of biosynthetic gene clusters for natural products and b) exploit fully the synthetic chemical diversity through combinatorial nucleic acid-encoded library and generative machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Preliminary program includes

Faculty Speakers:

• Albert Berghuis, Department of Biochemistry, McGill University
• Bastien Castagner, Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics, McGill University
• Jean-Philippe Côté, Department of Microbiology and Biotechnology, Université de Sherbrooke
• Andréanne Lupien, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, McGill University
• Francois Malouin, Department of Biology, Université de Sherbrooke
• Ré Mansbach, Department of Physics, Concordia University
• Martin Schmeing, Department of Biochemistry, McGill University

Career Insights Trainee Luncheon

Trainee flash talks 

Poster Session - submit abstract here