This year, the annual Life Sciences Center (LSC) Scientific Conference took place at the Vilnius University Medical Sciences Center – a new space that symbolically emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between the life and medical sciences.
The conference was opened by LSC Director Dr. Arvydas Lubys, who expressed his joy at the opportunity for the community to meet in person and reminded attendees of the main goal of this year’s event – to gain a deeper understanding of both their colleagues’ scientific work and the research taking place in the field of medicine, to establish new connections, and to initiate collaboration. He also expressed hope that, in the future, this conference will increasingly become a platform for presenting ongoing projects and emerging ideas.
A welcome address was also delivered by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Karolis Ažukaitis, Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation at the Faculty of Medicine. He emphasized that one of the key goals of the Medical Sciences Center is to strengthen translational science by creating conditions for the practical application of scientific research in clinical practice. He also praised the contributions of Life Sciences Center researchers to advancing modern medicine and encouraged even closer cooperation, noting that only by working together can we address the most complex health challenges.
The conference program reflected the broad scope of research at the Life Sciences Center, ranging from biochemistry, molecular and structural biology to gene editing, microbiota, epigenetics, neurology, cancer biology, microbiology, virology, and bioinformatics.
After the first day’s presentation sessions, participants were invited to guided tours of the Medical Sciences Center laboratories. They also had the opportunity to become donors to the Lithuanian Population and Rare Diseases Biobank – the first of its kind in the country. The biobank collects, stores, and analyzes biological samples and health data from healthy individuals and those not suffering from critical illnesses (such as cancer). Symbolically, the 100th donor was Monika Tenkutytė, a member of the LSC Department of Molecular Cell Biology and a recent graduate of the master’s program in molecular biology.
The winners of this year’s oral and poster presentation awards were announced at the end of the second conference day. The audience’s favorites who received awards for oral presentations were Akshay Kumar Vijaya, Dr. Algirdas Žiogas, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Julija Armalytė. The best poster presentations were awarded to Arnas Kunevičius and Džiugas Sabonis. Congratulations to all the winners!
We sincerely thank all participants, speakers, moderators, volunteers, and organizers – each of you contributed to disseminating life sciences within the LSC community and, this year, to an essential dialogue with the medical community. We are also particularly grateful to the Medical Sciences Center for their warm welcome and collaboration. We hope that this partnership will continue to grow stronger and that future joint initiatives between scientists and medical professionals will increasingly lead to breakthroughs in disease treatment.
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| Nuotr. Raimundo Šuikos |