Seth Masters

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Associate Professor Seth Masters, BSC (Hons) Melbourne, PhD Melbourne Laboratory Head, Inflammation Division, Walter & Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI)

‘How inherited inflammatory diseases can help in understanding and treating disorders such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, motor neuron disease and inflammatory bowel disease.’

Inflammation is the body’s weapon to fight against infection, but occasionally people are born with an inherited predisposition to develop inflammatory disease, even when there is no infection present.

A single genetic change can sometimes cause a severe inflammatory condition to develop very early in life. Recently, research at WEHI has identified several of these genetic changes and studying them has facilitated diagnosis and therapy for a number of patients.

This personalised medicine has provided insight into how the immune system works, and may provide targets for the development of drugs to treat more common inflammatory conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, motor neuron disease and inflammatory bowel disease, even in people without genetic susceptibility.

A/Prof Seth Masters is head of the Inflammasomes and Auto inflammatory Disease laboratory at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. He holds joint appointments at Glaxosmithkline (UK) and Guangzhou Institute of Paediatrics (China), and is appointed as a fellow of the Viertel Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Health and Medical Research Council.