Dear Colleagues,

This letter is to inform you on a variety of important issues of the ETRS and a recently published Science paper which will undoubtedly have substantial impact on the design of studies on tissue repair.

At our last board meeting on 21 January 2006, held at Pisa, all board members agreed to encourage more young investigators to attend our meetings and to step into research on wound healing. We are confident that only the perpetuated recruitment of young investigators would guarantee the constant influx of new ideas and the quality of basic and clinical research which will promote the development of new products. The following actions will be taken immediately to attract young investigators:

First, reduced registration of 150 Euros at the Annual Meeting for students. Evidence for the student status would require a letter from the sponsor and a certificate of their matriculation at the University.

Secondly, the ETRS board has increased the Young Investigator Awards from five to ten, each worth 500 Euros. All of them will be awarded one year´s free membership of the ETRS including receipt of the journal Wound Repair and Regeneration. If not already members, they will be encouraged to join the ETRS and retain their memberships thereafter.

Thirdly, at the ETRS Annual Meeting, two prizes each of 500 Euros will be awarded to the best posters in the categories of a) clinical and b) basic science. All awards will be presented at the ETRS Annual Meeting in a special ceremony (for details see the website of the ETRS http://www. etrs.org/html). The ETRS intends to keep their tradition in furthering the communication as well as the personal and science-based interactions with the Wound Healing Society. We are convinced that the combination of the ETRS and the WHS with their specific profiles will synergistically enhance our societies and promote their research.
An important step in this direction was the nomination of Professor Marco Romanelli (ETRS Board Member) as an International Board Member of the Wound Healing Society. We congratulate Marco Romanelli and look forward very much to his efforts on expanding interactions between the two societies. Professor Jeffrey Davidson, the current President of the WHS, delivered a most interesting lecture on the role of mesenchymal stem cells in tissue repair processes at the last ETRS meeting during the Stuttgart Meeting in September 2005. We all appreciate his open, friendly and dedicated personality and his impressive contribution to research on tissue repair.

He and his colleagues have assembled a most interesting scientific programme for the Annual Meeting of the WHS being held at Scottsdale, Arizona from 14– 17 May 2006. Pre meeting workshops cover such topics as: ‘Getting your product reimburded, how to receive a OIG audit’; an introductory and refresher course covering both the basis and the newest information for students of wound healing; a plenary session on ‘Burn Wounds’; ‘The New Molecular Biology in the Clinic’; a Presidential Symposium on Aging; hands-on courses; and many sessions covering different aspects of acute and chronic wound healing in various organs, including gene therapy, growth factors and stem cells. Please find the exact programme at the Website of the WHS (http://www.woundheal.org).

We are also looking forward to a joint meeting between the ETRS and the WHS in France 2009. Alexis Desmouliere together with Jeffrey Davidson and their colleagues will organise this joint meeting. On behalf of the ETRS board I would like to welcome Professor Hilde Beele from the Department of Dermatology and Tissue Bank, Ghent University Hospital, Belgium. Professor Beele was co-opted as a full board member. She has dedicated her research on rare wound healing disturbances and along this research line has collected an enormous tissue bank.

Finally, I would like to focus your attention on an interesting recent publication in Science (Grzegorz Terszowski, Susanna M. Müller, Conrad C. Bleul, Carmen Blum, Reinhold Schirmbeck, Jörg Reimann, Louis Du Pasquier, Takashi Amagai, Thomas Boehm and Hans-Reimer Rodewald: ‘Evidence for a Functional Second Thymus in Mice’. Science 312: 284 – 287, 2006). Scientists headed by Professor Hans-Reimer Rodewald (Department of Immunology, University of Ulm, Germany) and scientists from collaborating laboratories from Switzerland, Japan and Germany have provided sound evidence for a functional second thymus in mice. ‘The thymus organ supports the development of T cells and is located in the thorax’, and thymectomy has been used to study effects of T cells and T-cell development on tissue repair. The authors report now ‘the existence of a second thymus in the mouse neck, which develops after birth and grows to the size of a small lymph node. The cervical thymus had a typical medulla-cortex structure, was found to support T-cell development, and could correct T-cell deficiency in athymic nude mice upon transplantation. The identification of a regular second thymus in the mouse may provide evolutionary links to thymus organogenesis in other vertebrates and suggests a need to reconsider theeffect of thoracic thymectomy on de novo T-cell production’. In this regard, scientists interested in tissur repair need to reconsider data derived from thymectomized mice, and with the novel data on a second neck thymus in mind will rather decide for athymic nude mice or Lkr Cre mice for studies on the role of T cells in tissue repair.

On behalf of the Congress President for the next Annual Meeting in Pisa (Marco Romanelli) and my ETRS board fellows, I would like to invite your contribution, and I am looking forward to meeting you in Pisa or before, in Arizona.

With my best regards,

Karin Scharffetter-Kochanek
President