BSGCT Travel Award winner 2024 – Rebecca Bayliss

I was fortunate enough to be awarded the BSGCT travel grant to attend the BSGCT annual conference held between the 17-19^th June 2024 in Oxford. The event took place in the SaΪd business school, a perfect location, just a stones through away from the train station and city centre with it’s many hotels and dining venues.

The conference kicked-off with an early career development and collaboration event organized by the ECDC sub-committee, involving lunch and walking tour of Oxford. This is a key event, giving early career researchers the opportunity to meet with and interact with peers to encourage scientific discussion and form potential collaborations ahead of the start of the scientific programme. This always proves to a valuable experience and great way to meet other ECRs in a relaxed and fun environment with the added bonus of being able to catch up with existing collaborators and colleagues attending the conference.

The scientific programme gave a great balance of academic and industrial based talks and posters as well as a range of targeted suppliers selected to be directly relevant to the gene therapy community. I enjoyed the timetabled poster sessions and used the time to discuss not only work directly relevant to my own interests, but to explore how industry partners could benefit my research going forward. It was also a great opportunity to get up to date with our existing industry partners about progress of products going into the clinic. The time given to network between sessions was invaluable and I was able to form new contacts and ongoing collaborations.

I had the privilege of presenting my work on the second day presenting my research on the development of precision virotherapies expressing bispecific molecules in the virotherapy session alongside leading experts on the topic. Not only did this give me the opportunity to share my research but opened the floor to valuable scientific discussion on the subject with leading experts in the field. This helped me to really understand the limitations of existing treatments from people with first hand experience, to help develop my research to specifically address these issues.  The other sessions were just as inspiring, especially in regard to the talks on promising developments for rare childhood genetic diseases and a patient advocate giving their valued perspective on living with Phelan McDermid syndrome (PMSF UK representative).

The conference dinner was held in the beautiful setting where we were treated to a wonderful three course meal and a truly inspiring after dinner speaker, talking us through the development and role out of the COVID vaccine, illustrating  how dedicated and determined members of the vaccine and gene therapy scientific communities are to making a real difference to the health of patients.

As an early career researcher smaller focused meetings such as BSGCT give delegates more opportunity to meet the countries leading experts and relevant industrial partners in a non-threatening environment and enables you to form lasting networks and collaborations as well as allowing to build on your scientific profile, which is essential for an independent research career.

Overall, this award gave me the opportunity to engage with a wide range of researchers in the gene therapy field, gaining more in depth knowledge of current gene and cell therapy developments and the hurdles still to overcome.  BSGCT is a great community to be part of, helping to build your career and available to give advice on the next steps in your scientific career and to be given the support and opportunity to do is, I think, unique to BSGCT.