Cyagen is attending the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) Annual Meeting - IMMUNOLOGY2025™ - from May 3–7 in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Stop by Booth #430 to discover how our custom and catalog models enable groundbreaking research in tumor immunology, autoimmune diseases, infectious disease, and cell & gene therapies.

Our team will be available to discuss how Cyagen’s CRO platforms support translational immunology and therapeutic discovery.

• Cyagen Booth: 430
• Dates: May 3-7, 2025
• Location: Hawaii Convention Center | Honolulu, HI
  

Meet Our Experts at IMMUNOLOGY2025™ Booth 430

Dr. Marvin Yingbin Ouyang, Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, and Dr. Joseph Wekselblatt, Senior Scientific Business Development Manager, will represent Cyagen at Booth 430. They are eager to discuss how Cyagen’s comprehensive, next-generation CAM & CRO services can accelerate your R&D efforts.

Marvin Yingbin Ouyang, MD, PhD

Cyagen’s Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer

Before joining Cyagen in 2012, Dr. Ouyang served as a senior scientist at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Thios Pharmaceuticals in the United States, and as Group Leader of the Molecular Biology Department of Taconic Biosciences. Over the past 20 years, he has committed himself to the custom design and generation of genetically engineered mice. While at Cyagen, he has successfully developed thousands of transgenic and gene knockout/knockin mouse and rat models for the biomedical research and drug discovery communities worldwide. He has published many papers in high-level academic journals such as PNAS and JBC; his technical services have been directly cited by Nature and other international journals hundreds of times.

Joseph (Joe) Wekselblatt, PhD

Senior Scientific Business Development Manager at Cyagen

Joseph Wekselblatt has been in the scientific field for well over a decade, having studied the visual capabilities in species including mice and rats, barn owls, tree shrews, humans and non-human primates.

Joseph Wekselblatt attended Brown University from 2004 to 2008, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science. Joseph then attended the University of Oregon from 2011 to 2017, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Neurobiology. Joseph is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Caltech, where he has been since 2017. In 2023, he transitioned to Cyagen as a Senior Scientific Business Development Manager.

Dr. Wekselblatt’s Research

“The central goal of my work has been to understand the role of functionally defined brain areas along the tree shrew visual hierarchy in processing visual object representation. Importantly, tree shrews have a substantially more complex visual system than rodents and a clear experimental advantage over primate models.

I have developed expertise in the proto-primate model using recently developed techniques for whole-brain functional imaging and modulation. Existing animal models present methodological challenges: in primates, which allow the probing of complex cognition, it is difficult to record from large ensembles of neurons across multiple brain areas or manipulate genetically defined cell populations; in rodents, rudimentary cortical organization and behavioral repertoire limits the modeling of visual processing.

Over the past 5+ years I have established the brain-wide organization of the visual system using a functional ultrasound imaging – non-invasive imaging technique which allows measurements of evoked activity across the entire brain, much like fMRI, but with greatly improved spatial and temporal resolution. Next, I have targeted high density silicon probe recordings (neuropixels) to various nodes of this network (e.g. V1, V2, and IT) and measured the local activity in response to a host of visual stimuli used in classical visual physiology studies. I have also developed techniques to manipulate populations of genetically defined cells in a non-invasive and spatially targeted way in each of these regions using acoustically targeted delivery of promoter-specific virus carrying inhibitory DREADDs by transiently disrupting the blood brain barrier. This allows specific and reversible control, by decreasing the excitability of genetically defined excitatory cell populations at different nodes in this hierarchy with the systemic administration of CNO or other DREADD receptor agonists. Finally, I have developed custom behavior systems to test the behavioral effects of these targeted manipulations in the tree shrew on several different behaviors. This work provides valuable new information to researchers and clinicians about the function and computations of sensory transformations along cortical networks. “ -Joseph Wekselblatt

Have questions for our specialists or want more information?

Request a meeting in-person at AAI 2025 to discuss your project.

Click here to book the in-person meeting!

Contact us for a free consultation on your CAM/CGT projects.  

Founded in 2006, Cyagen is a global provider of genetically modified rodent models and innovative cell and gene therapy (CGT) solutions for research and development (R&D), including: disease model development, AAV discovery, drug efficacy studies, and more. The company has established extensive cooperations with scientists and institutions in more than 100 countries, leading to the publication of over 6,300 academic articles, many of which were in the three major journals of CNS (Cell, Nature, Science). From its robust foundation in animal model development, to implementation of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools for data analysis and therapeutic discoveries, Cyagen provides one-stop solutions for accelerating basic research and new drug R&D with our unique offering of models, data, algorithms, and services.