SARS ANNUAL MEETING, 12-14 JANUARY 2005, HILTON HOTEL GATESHEAD, NEWCASTLE

Celebrating 50 years of SRS / SARS

The annual meeting was held in Newcastle and our sincere thanks to the local organiser Mike Wyatt for all his hard work that made it such a success. The newly opened Hilton Hotel at Gateshead , with panoramic views of the City of Newcastle and the River Tyne, was the impressive and comfortable venue. This year’s meeting had as its theme ’50 years of SRS/ SARS ’ and there was an outstanding programme with a mixture of peer-reviewed papers and posters, plenary sessions and debates.

The meeting was truly international with invited speakers including:

• Professor James Fawcett, University of Queensland , Australia , who gave the BJS lecture on the subject of cell adhesion
• Professor James Shapiro, University of Edmonton , Canada , who delivered the John Farndon Memorial Lecture on the subject of clinical islet transplantation
• Professor Michael Menger, Hamburg , who gave a keynote talk on microcirculatory dysfunction in ischaemia-reperfusion.

It was a great pleasure to have guests at the meeting from our ‘sister’ societies, namely the SUS, ESSR and the South African Society for Surgical Research.

In recognising two of the major areas of progress in medicine over the last 50 years, plenary sessions were dedicated to ‘Advances in Transplantation’ and ‘Genetics of Gastrointestinal Diseases’. At both, internationally recognised experts delivered the results of recent research in these areas as well as making predictions for future developments.

The Patey Prize was awarded to:

E Myers, ADK Hill, EW McDermott, NJ O’Higgins and LS Young from The Department of Surgery, St Vincent ’s Hospital and The Conway Institute, University College Dublin for the paper entitled: A predictive role for ETS-2 and SRC-1 in endocrine resistant breast cancer.

The President’s Poster Prize for the best poster presentation was awarded to:

CD Vimalachandran, CC Thompson, AR Shekouh, A Dodson, W Prime, F Campbell, JP Neoptolemos and E Costello from the Division of Surgery and Oncology, University of Liverpool and The Department of Pathology, Royal Liverpool Hospital , for the poster entitled: identification of novel proteins in the pancreatic cancer microenvironment.