About the Program

The 69th Annual Thomas L. Petty Aspen Lung Conference, 2027

"Lung Immunity and Pulmonary Infections"

In-person or virtual live streaming format is available.
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June 8–11, 2027 | The Viceroy, Snowmass Village, Colorado

Respiratory infections affect people across the lifespan and remain a major cause of illness in children, older adults, and patients with chronic lung disease. Beyond causing acute illness, they can precipitate worsening asthma, COPD, interstitial lung disease, and pulmonary fibrosis. Their impact depends not only on the infectious agent but also on the host response and the local lung environment. Injury arises from the interaction among pathogens, innate and adaptive immunity, structural lung cells, and the airway and alveolar microenvironment. These interactions determine whether infection is cleared, contained, or persists—and whether the response restores lung health or drives inflammation, remodeling, microbiome disruption, and long-term pulmonary vulnerability.

Vaccines, antibiotics, antifungals, corticosteroids, anti-inflammatory therapies, and biologics have reduced the burden of infection-related lung disease and inflammatory exacerbations. Yet many patients remain vulnerable to severe or recurrent infection, acute exacerbations, acute lung injury, and ARDS. This vulnerability may reflect impaired host immunity, aging, environmental exposures, pathogen evolution, altered repair, or maladaptive remodeling. The field therefore needs earlier diagnostics and more precise therapies that strengthen protective immunity while limiting harmful inflammation. Achieving this goal requires a deeper understanding of pulmonary immune mechanisms, pathogen-specific disease biology, and the cellular, molecular, and genomic pathways that connect infection to clinical lung disease.

The 69th Annual Thomas L. Petty Aspen Lung Conference will convene June 8–11, 2027, at The Viceroy in Snowmass Village, Colorado, under the theme “Lung Immunity and Pulmonary Infections.” The program will bring together basic, translational, and clinical investigators to examine how infectious agents interact with host immunity and how the lung microenvironment shapes pathogen clearance, persistence, inflammatory injury, repair, and long-term respiratory outcomes. Sessions will integrate pulmonary immunology, microbiology, epithelial and stromal biology, the lung microbiome and gut–lung axis, environmental susceptibility, diagnostics, and therapeutic innovation.

The conference will address a central question: Can a deeper understanding of host–pathogen interactions and the lung microenvironment explain why some infections resolve while others drive chronic inflammation, exacerbations, acute lung injury, ARDS, and progressive lung disease—and can that knowledge support earlier diagnosis and more personalized therapy?

A major focus will be how lung infections precipitate acute lung injury and ARDS. Bacterial, viral, fungal, and polymicrobial infections can disrupt epithelial and endothelial barriers, intensify innate immune activation, and recruit neutrophils and macrophages in ways that damage alveoli, impair gas exchange, and drive respiratory failure. The conference will explore how pathogen virulence, host susceptibility, preexisting lung disease, microbial community structure, and the airway and alveolar microenvironment determine whether infection resolves or progresses to maladaptive inflammation, sepsis-associated lung injury, and ARDS.

The program is organized around four integrated themes:

A. Host–pathogen interactions and lung immune defense: Innate sensing, adaptive immunity, epithelial–stromal–immune crosstalk, lung-resident immune memory, antibody regulation, and mechanisms that determine pathogen clearance, persistence, tissue injury, repair, and infectious exacerbations of chronic lung disease

B. Lung microbiome, gut–lung axis, exposome, and tissue context: How resident microbial communities, environmental exposures, aging, structural-cell function, and local immune tone influence susceptibility to acute, chronic, and recurrent infection across the lifespan

C. Diagnostics, phenotyping, and precision therapeutics: Molecular diagnostics, image-based analysis, multiomics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computational approaches, and biomarker discovery to define infection-related phenotypes and endotypes and guide precision therapy

D. Acute pneumonia, respiratory viral infections, ARDS, sepsis, chronic infection, and immune dysregulation: Translational approaches to pneumonia heterogeneity, host–pathogen interactions, neutrophilic inflammation, chronic bacterial and mycobacterial infection, and multiomic advances in diagnosis, prognosis, and disease biology

Conference goals:

1. Promote exchange among leading basic, translational, and clinical investigators in pulmonary medicine, infectious diseases, and immunology

2. Identify shared scientific opportunities that can catalyze new research collaborations and clinical interventions

3. Accelerate translation of basic and preclinical discoveries into diagnostic and therapeutic strategies that improve patient outcomes

4. Inspire early career investigators to address the complex interplay among pathogens, host immunity, the lung microenvironment, and chronic pulmonary disease

Twelve internationally recognized leaders will deliver State-of-the-Art lectures followed by moderated discussion. Selected abstracts will be featured as brief podium presentations, with additional abstracts presented during two evening poster sessions.

Abstracts are invited on lung immunity and acute, chronic, or recurrent pulmonary infections, including host–pathogen interactions, infectious exacerbations, pneumonia, respiratory viral infection, chronic bacterial and mycobacterial infection, ARDS, sepsis, microbiome biology, environmental susceptibility, biomarker discovery, molecular diagnostics, image-based analysis, multiomics, and precision therapeutics. Abstracts will be considered for podium and/or poster presentation. The submission deadline is February 14, 2027, and notifications will be sent by March 31, 2027. Seven Travel Awards will recognize trainees and early-stage investigators with the top-scoring abstracts.

The conference will provide an international forum for investigators and trainees in pulmonary medicine, infectious diseases, physiology, genetics, cell biology, and immunology to exchange ideas, build collaborations, and define research priorities that advance lung health.

Conference Summarizer Charles Dela Cruz, M.D., Ph.D., ATSF, will synthesize the meeting’s scientific themes and therapeutic implications, highlighting current advances, unanswered questions, and priorities for the next decade of research in lung immunity, pulmonary infections, and chronic lung disease.

We are excited to be hosting this timely conference and look forward to you joining us in beautiful Snowmass Village, CO.

Co-Chairs, 69th Annual Meeting
Thomas L. Petty Aspen Lung Conference

Ivor S. Douglas, MD—Barbara & William Rosenthal Chair of Medicine, New York Medical College; Director, Department of Medicine, Westchester Medical Center 

R. Lee Reinhardt, PhD—Professor, Immunology & Genomic Medicine, National Jewish Health; Associate Professor, Immunology & Microbiology, University of Colorado Anschutz

Sarah Clark PhD—Associate Professor, Department of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus