Better treatments are urgently needed for a range of devastating brain diseases, including prevalent neurodegenerative diseases, brain tumors and metastases, and rare genetic conditions. One major challenge in development of experimental CNS disease therapies is the lack of efficient tailored strategies for their delivery to the brain and spinal cord. This is the only conference to focuses entirely on scientific and technological advances and challenges in delivering new therapies, across a wide range of modalities, to appropriate compartments in the CNS.

The principal goals are to:

1. Showcase scientific advances in understanding, mapping and identifying targets to exploit for drug delivery across brain barriers
2. Share advances in discovery, design and development of novel CNS drug delivery technologies for delivery of established and emerging therapeutics, including receptor-mediated transcytosis approaches, as well as delivery by viruses, cells, nanoparticles and other vehicles.
3. Address translational successes and challenges with in vitro and in vivo models of complex brain transport and disease processes, that are critical for designing and evaluating brain delivery technologies
4. Provide updates on and critical evaluation of clinical trials using various brain delivery approaches, and discuss lessons learned including reverse translational hypotheses to guide future studies.

The conference will spur multidisciplinary interactions and collaborations between scientists and trainees from academia, government and industry, including a wide range of biotech and biopharmaceutical companies. Importantly, participants include basic, translational and clinical scientists from diverse backgrounds, bridging fields of drug delivery, neuroscience, bioengineering, drug discovery and development.  Collectively these diverse perspectives will generate innovative insights and new directions to finally tackle this enormous challenge in medicine.