17th Annual Meeting recently held in September was a great success. Our President-Elect, Raj Mani, who organised the meeting, deserves to be congratulated for doing such an excellent job, both scientifically and socially. The site at the Botley Park Country Club proved to be an excellent venue, particularly for the logistics of attending the lectures as well as the proximity of commercial exhibitions which facilitated the interactions between delegates and industry. I personally heard numerous comments concerning the appreciation of this arrangement by the commercial sponsors as well as comments on the quality of the scientific programme and social events by the participants.

However, as Raj has pointed out in his report, the percentage of members attending was only 25% and obviously we need to do much more to attract a higher number of our membership.

As a co-host of the World Union of Wound Healing Societies 3rd Congress in Toronto, 4-8 June 2008, this event will serve as our major Meeting for the year and I would encourage all of our members to attend and participate in this. An announcement is included in this issue. Abstracts should be submitted on line (http://portal.wuwhs2008.ca).

In addition, the ETRS will have a joint educational Meeting with the Tissue Viability Unit of Malta on 10-12 September 2008, which David Leaper is coordinating.

I was saddened to hear of the death of Charles Lapière, our first president and founding member of the ETRS. Terence Ryan has written a personal reflection on Charles which is part of this issue. In addition I have reprinted an article that Charles wrote on the history of the Society in our Tenth Anniversary issue of the ETRS Bulletin, 1998.

I first met Charles at a meeting he organised at Liège in 1982 on Mechanical Forces and the Fibroblast. We resumed our collaboration at the first Oxford- European Dermatology Summer School on Wound Healing (see photo below) where I had invited him as one of the course faculty in the summer of 1990.

I also worked closely with him in his role as first President in the organisation of the first Annual ETRS meeting here in Oxford in 1991. This proved to be a very successful meeting in which the aim was to combine both basic research and tissue repair and to relate these to clinical practice. At this meeting Charles had personally invited Professor R. Ross of the University of Washington, Seattle, as the keynote speaker to give a lecture on his pioneering work on information, growth-regulatory molecules and the fibro-proliferative response. Again the feature of the meeting was the combination of basic research with clinical application, and, in my opinion, this combination has led to the success of our Annual Meetings up to the present.

In this issue we are privileged to have ‘news from the laboratory’ written by Dr Jan Vranckx who has recently set up a new laboratory of Plastic Surgery and Tissue Engineering Research at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Jan spent time in the laboratory of Professor Elof Eriksson, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, University of Harvard, Boston and has extended this research to Leuven and in a short time has been very successful. He recently received his Ph.D for the work. We continue to encourage our members to send such reports as well as any other news and job opportunities.

If you have chosen to receive Wound Repair & Regeneration and are having any problems receiving the journal or getting on-line access, please email us at the Business Office (oxfordwound@aol.com).

The ETRS Business Office wishes all our members and colleagues a peaceful, happy and fruitful New Year.

Dr George W. Cherry
Editor