REWARD | EQUATOR Conference - Sharing Strategies for Research Improvement We are pleased to present a diverse range of invited speakers, including Dr Kris Thayer, Director of the Integrated Risk Information Systems Division at the US Environmental Protection Agency; Dr Allison Harbin, freelance writer and editor whose blog describing her PhD experience has resonated with graduate students across disciplines; Sir Jim Smith, Director of Science at the Wellcome Trust, and Dr Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist concerned with the social and policy dimensions of translational research. The meeting will include an inaugural EQUATOR Doug Altman lecture by Prof Isabelle Boutron, Université Paris Descartes, France. Further to submitted research (oral presentations/posters), we have created space for less traditional conference formats including so-called focus tracks (structured discussions between conference participants) and formats encouraging authors to present content that is relevant to the conference themes, however doesn’t fit into the research abstract format („Concepts, Initiatives and Ideas”). https://www.reward-equator-conference-2020.com/ Our ambition has been to create a faculty of insiders and outsiders, of those immersed every day in the challenges of biomedical research and of others from outside this narrow world, that their perspective may bring new understanding to the problems we face.

Innate lymphoid cells (ILC) are a type of white blood cell that mainly reside inside organs such as the lungs and the gut. There is a lot of interest in these cells as they have been shown to play important roles in maintaining health and in fighting infections and cancer. Additionally, under certain conditions they have also been shown to drive disease progression. Despite their many roles in the body, ILC exist in small numbers in distant and hard to access tissues, so it is difficult to obtain enough cells to study them. This means that most researchers turn to the use of animals, such as mice, for their studies as ILC are much easier to obtain this way. This project aims to establish a technology by which to generate human ILC in sufficient numbers for experimental studies and can therefore be used to replace the need for mouse models. Recently, we discovered that organoids, these are mini-organs grown in the lab in a dish, are able to support the generation of large numbers of human ILC. We can easily obtain cells that have the capacity to become ILC (ILC precursors) from blood. Then, we add these precursor cells to the mini-organs where they are able to grow and fully development into ILC. Moreover, the type of mini-organ used is important for the development of these cells. The ILC grown in mini-guts are similar to ILC taken straight from the human the gut whilst ILC that grow in mini-lungs are similar to those taken from the lung. With this project we aim to further develop and validate this technology by analysing in detail the characteristics of the ILC that grow in our mini-organs. This will provide reassurance to the scientific community that these cells are able to accurately resemble the ILC found in the human body and so other scientists can confidently use this technology to grow cells for their studies. By doing this we aim for this technology to be widely adopted by the scientific community leading to ILC generated in our mini-organs to replace the use of mouse ILC in certain studies. As this technology advances, so will the number of studies in which this model will be able to be used instead of mice. Moreover, our technology has the additional benefit that as the cells being used are taken from humans they are able to more accurately model the roles of ILC in human health and disease