10th International Congress of the Immunology of Diabetes Society in Malm?,Sweden

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As the founding President of the Immunology of Diabetes Society and current co-chair of the Organizing Committee, Dr. Lernmark is submitting a grant to the National Institutes of Health for meeting support of the 10th International Congress of the Immunology of Diabetes Society (IDS) to be held in Malmoe, Sweden between Wednesday May 13 and Saturday May 16, 2009. This is a 3.5 day meeting that we expect to be attended by approximately 400 delegates from all over the world. The IDS is an international forum from all aspects of autoimmune type 1 diabetes - etiology- both genetic and environmental, pathogenesis, prediction, prevention, intervention and cure. International meetings are held under the IDS'auspice every 1.5 years. The last meeting was in Miami, FL in November, 2007. For this next meeting we are focusing on presenting recent advances in type 1 diabetes through key note address presentations, Symposia, Hot Topics, Debates, Oral presentations (10 min and 5 min discussion) and poster presentations the state of the art information within related fields. Oral presentations will be selected from submitted abstracts. There will be two workshops - one presenting results from the Diabetes Autoantibody Standardization Program (DASP) supported by the CDC and NIH and another about T cell Assay Standardization. The belief is that the diabetes immunology community will benefit much by sharing of information in the newest advances of other fields of research in immunology, genetics and autoimmunity. Hence the Key Address speakers are leading scientist in these fields of research. The organizing committee is planning to broadcast the lectures and presentations live on the internet. These lectures and presentations will also be archived and available on the conference website for a limited period of time streaming audio and on CD. More than half of the grant will be used to provide travel scholarships to young investigators. Travel grants for young investigators will be chosen by numerical ratings of submitted abstracts. Additional travel funding will be applied to Key Note address speakers, symposia speakers of Hot topics speakers chosen by the international organizing committee as outlined in the preliminary program. Type 1 diabetes, caused by an autoimmune attack on the pancreatic islet beta cells is the most common chronic disease in children. The incidence is increasing world-wide. There is no cure of type 1 diabetes and patients are dependent on daily insulin injections for the rest of their life-time. Every patients suffer the risk of late complications affecting the blood vessels, retina, kidney and nerves. It is a very expensive disease for the individual patient and for society.