|
 2006
has started out as a productive year for the ETRS and, with our forthcoming
16th Annual meeting in Pisa, 13–16 September, which is being organised
by Marco Romanelli, this will highlight the continued strength of the
ETRS in its sixteenth year. In this issue of the ETRS Bulletin Marco goes
into more detail on our annual meeting in Pisa.
In January of this year the Board had a meeting in Pisa which included
recently- elected board members. This meeting allowed us to visit the
excellent facilities of the Congress venue for September as well as deciding
on the policy of offering ten bursaries, each worth 500 euros, for young
investigators under the age of 35 to attend the meeting. The Board meeting
was held under the chairmanship of our new president, Professor Karin
Scharffetter-Kochanek, who is committed to the continued success of the
ETRS as outlined in her letter in this issue.
In addition Luc Téot, past president of the ETRS, and Bernard Guillot
in conjunction with other major wound healing societies organised the
first Scar Focus meeting in Montpellier, France in March 2006. The abstracts
of that meeting will be published in the ETRS Bulletin and will be available
on our website: <www.etrs.org>.
ABOVE: Members of the
ETRS Board during their meeting in Pisa, from left to right (top line):
Raj Mani, Mike Clark, Mark Ferguson, Esther Middelkoop, Karin Scharffetter-
Kochanek,
(bottom line) Marco Romanelli, Meike Flour and Sabine Eming.
In this
issue of the Bulletin we have career summaries of three of our new board
members, Hilde Beele, Sabine Eming and David Leaper. Sabine has contributed,
in the section ‘News from Laboratories’, an article on research
that she has carried out on VEGF-A. In addition in this section we have
an article from Esther Middelkoop’s laboratory – Dutch programme
for Tissue Engineering. This issue also features news from Industry from
KCI, an ETRS corporate sponsor on ‘What’s new in Topical Negative
Pressure as delivered by V.A.C.® Therapy™.
Lastly I recently had the opportunity of attending the 19th Annual Symposium
on Advanced Wound Care held in conjunction with the Annual Medical Research
Forum on Wound Repair in San Antonio, Texas in April of this year. More
than 2000 delegates attended this annual event. Over the last five years
of this meeting one of the highlights has been the presentation of the
John Bowsick Memorial award and lectureship to an individual for their
contribution to Wound Healing during his individual career.
ABOVE: Elof Eriksson,
Prof Kel Cohen
and Dr Olukyanka Olugoye
This
year’s recipient was Kel Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Plastic and
Reconstructive Surgery, Virginia Commonwealth
University. I have known Kel personally for a number of years and he is
also known to many of our ETRS members, not only through his accomplishments
in research in wound healing – particularly abnormal collagen metabolism
and hypertrophic scar pathophysiology – but also from his participation
in a number of our Annual meetings. He has also participated in ETRS Focus
Meetings, particularly the meeting that we held a number of years ago
in Germany on Wound Pharmacology in which he took part along with a representative
from the FDA. He still remains active in wound healing research as well
as developing new innovations in this field. Kel was one of the founding
members of the
Wound Healing Society as well as a past President of that Society.
A feature of the Award is to have two individuals that have worked with
the Award recipient to give accompanying presentations of their research.
This year one of these was Elof Eriksson of the Department of Plastic
Surgery, Harvard
University speaking on a new way to transplant skin. Elof also has been
a supporter of the ETRS, attending many of our annual meetings. The other
speaker was Dr Olukyanka Olugoye who also worked with Kel and is now Assistant
Professor of Surgery in Paediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston,
Texas. He gave an excellent presentation on ‘Scarless Wound Healing
and the Foetal Inflammatory Response’ which continued the research
that he had begun while in Kel Cohen’s laboratory. Terence Ryan,
our second president of the ETRS, has also been a recipient of this award
in the past.
Part of the membership fee, for those who elect to include it in their
annual payment, is a subscription to Wound Repair & Regeneration which
the ETRS co-sponsors as its official journal. The Business Office coordinates
with the
publisher, Blackwell, in ensuring that paid members who have paid the
additional fee
are receiving their issues of this excellent journal. If any of the members
are having problems in receiving their copy of the journal please e-mail
to the Business Office at: oxfordwound@aol.com.
We look forward to seeing all our members in Pisa in September at our
16th Annual Meeting.
Dr George W. Cherry
Editor
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