Date: September 13, 2025
Time: 5:45 pm to 7:15 pm
Room: Grand Ballrooms 5 - 6 (Third Floor Level)
Track: Plenary - Opening Symposium
This symposium marks the 75th Anniversary of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). For decades, NINDS has advanced pivotal studies in fundamental, translational, and clinical neuroscience, while simultaneously mapping future research needs and training the neuroscience workforce. This two-hour event, co-chaired by Drs. Walter Koroshetz and Eva Feldman, will highlight NINDS contributions to understanding, diagnosing, treating, and preventing neurological disorders, with the goal of reducing disease burden. To mark 75 years of progress, the panel will feature distinguished scientific speakers like Dr. Huda Zoghbi, Dr. Michael Ward, and Dr. Pooja Khatri. Additionally, this symposium will look to the future by highlighting people with lived experience and including a rising star trainee, Dr. Vikram Khurana, encouraging the audience to imagine the next 75 years of neuroscience.
At the conclusion of this symposium, attendees should be able to:
In this presentation, Dr. Huda Zoghbi will share how NINDS invested in her career as a young neurologist interested in disease biology and how that shaped her career in neurodegeneration research, especially the ataxias, and research in Rett syndrome and MECP2 duplication syndrome. She will also share the impact of NINDS support on people impacted by these disorders.
In this presentation, Dr. Michael Ward will highlight seminal discoveries and new technologies that have transformed our approach to therapeutic development for neurodegenerative diseases. Genetic discoveries, advanced disease models, and precision therapies – many of which were developed at the NIH or funded through NINDS – have led to the first effective treatments for these historically untreatable disorders and provide a foundation for new treatments of the future.
This presentation will discuss argeted disease-modifying neurotherapeutics for complex neurodegenerative diseases faces substantial hurdles: unclear biological drivers and markers of progression, chronicity of disease and patient heterogeneity. We outline an innovative approach called MyTrial to simultaneously test therapeutics in patients and their matched stem cells. Three vignettes –genetic therapy, small molecule and novel target identification.
In this presentation, Dr. Pooja Khatri will highlight our major advances in stroke care shaped by clinical research innovations and infrastructure supported by NINDS, drawing from her own NINDS-supported research career. These advances are paving the way for the next successes and a bright future.