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 AS
our members know, the ETRS had three openings on our Board. The Business
Office circulated to all of our paid members the nomination forms in which
twelve members were nominated. The interest in the nomination procedure
as well as in the final ballot of the three successful candidates was
extremely high. Congratulations to the three new Board members who are:
Dr Sabine Eming; Professor David Leaper; and Professor David Thomas. All
of these individuals have a wealth of experience in tissue repair and
hopefully will add their expertise to the objectives and growth of the
European Tissue Repair Society.
The European Tissue Repair Society, has, since its founding in 1988, been
a leader in the field of experimental and clinical research in this important
field. There has been discussion as to whether the Society has become
too complacent, which may be the case, but judging by the interest and
the response from our members in the recent Board election I believe the
Society has retained its high reputation mainly because of the quality
of its members.
The last issue of the ETRS Bulletin was dedicated to the status
of New Technologies in Tissue repair at the beginning of the 21st Century.
This was well received and we published a larger than average number of
Bulletins which have been circulated at a number of major wound healing
meetings throughout Europe and the world, including the ETRS stand at
the Stuttgart Meeting in September which was manned by the Business Office.
Our website: www.etrs.org is extremely
active and of all the sections the Bulletin receives the highest
number of hits. We are always looking for articles from our members or
other individuals in the field for the Bulletin and this also
includes research positions in both experimental and clinical tissue repair
as well as employment opportunities from both Academia and Industry. We
will be more than happy to freely advertise this in the Bulletin
and on our website.
This issue, at the end of 2005, has a wealth of subjects including photographs
of some of the founding Board Members (provided by Wiete Westerhof) at
the initial organisational meeting at Keukenhof Castle in the Netherlands
(see adjacent photographs).
Founding
of ETRS in 1988 at Keukenhov Castle, The Netherlands (left to right:
Wiete Westerhof, Thomas Krieg, Guilio Gabbiani, Charles Lapiere and Hugo
Degreef).
In this
issue the ‘News from the Laboratory’ section includes a report
on the development of technology for point-of-care diagnostics to cell
based therapy for chronic wounds. I was introduced to this interesting
work in Stuttgart where I chaired a session on the status of tissue engineering
in wound care and found this unit’s research extremely interesting
and asked them to report it to our members by writing an article in the
Bulletin.
Between our annual meetings the Society’s Focus meetings have played
an important role in covering specific aspects of tissue repair in greater
detail. We have two reports on recently held ETRS focus meetings. The
one in Nyon on The Myofibroblast, which was organised by Christine Charponnier,
Alexis Desmouliere and Guilio Gabbiani, was a great success. The report
in this issue has been prepared by Dr Margaret Hughes of the ETRS Business
Office who attended the meeting as well as giving a presentation of work
from our laboratory here in Oxford.
Wiete Westerhof and Terence Ryan at Keukenhov Castle,
The Netherlands, during the founding of ETRS in 1988.
The second
successful meeting was organised by Raj Mani at the University of Southampton
and was on diabetic vascular disease and wound complications. The unique
aspect of this meeting was that it introduced a number of specialities
of medicine to the European Tissue Repair Society which included podiatrists,
diabetologists and vascular surgeons as well as scientists. The ETRS Business
Office had a stand at this meeting which allowed us to
distribute ETRS literature to the participants.
In 2006 Luc Téot is organising a focus meeting on Scars ‘Innovation
and contradictions, the future to discover’. This meeting is being
held at the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier from 29 March to 1 April
2006. Further information can be obtained on <www.scar2006.com>
concerning registration and the programme.
In addition, the abstracts of the Young Investigators Awards, presented
in Stuttgart earlier this year, are included in this issue.
John Church, an orthopaedic surgeon who has participated in many of the
ETRS meetings and activities – particularly in the clinical use
of maggots or larvae therapy – has written an extremely interesting
article on the evolution of biotherapy including other biological species
such as leeches, worms, rats and dogs. In the case of dogs their ability
to recognise malignant melanoma and cancer of the urinary bladder has
gained much publicity in the media. In the latter he points out that a
controlled trial has been published by Willis and gives the
reference in his article.
Keep in mind that our annual meeting in 2006 will be in Pisa from 13-16
September. It is being organised by Marco Romanelli and will, I am sure,
be a great success. Marco has been a major contributor to our Society
as well as organising many successful wound healing meetings in his beautiful
city of Pisa. Brochures for the meeting accompany this issue and we would
appreciate it if you could circulate these to your colleagues to encourage
them to attend and submit an abstract.
Dr George W. Cherry
Editor
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