Dear ECTS members
As you know, the 47th Annual Meeting of the European Calcified Tissue Society is going virtual. The ECTS scientific program committee has put all efforts to present an attractive and stimulating scientific program directed at clinical researchers, basic and translational scientists, and allied health professionals working in the musculoskeletal field.
The goal, however, was not only to present an ECTS 2020 Digital Congress as a Live Prime Event which will take place from 22-24 October 2020, but to embed ECTS 2020 Digital in a 3 months educational program with weekly ECTS@Home series scheduled from 1 October until 12 December 2020.
ECTS 2020 Digital – a Live Prime Event (22-24 October 2020)
Along the lines of its traditions, ECTS reaches out and connects, and bridges the latest advances in basic/translational research with clinical relevance and progresses in the treatment of bone diseases. Each congress day, top-class keynote speakers join the basic and clinical state-of-the-art in a Plenary Symposium. One Symposium, organized in partnership with the Cancer and Bone Society (CABS), will focus on prostate cancer and bone, addressing the regulation of the metastatic phenotype by the bone microenvironment as well as the management and prevention of bone complications. For another Symposium we teamed up with the Bone Marrow Adiposity Society (BMAS) to bring you an update of the origin, fate, and fundamental characteristics of bone marrow adiposity and its clinical consequences. For the traditional ‘Insights from Outside’ we invited experts from the muscle field, and the annual ‘What is New?’ session will this year be dedicated to new basic science technologies and new therapeutic strategies.
Within the Big Clinical Session, which is jointly presented with the ASBMR, the role of a personalized approach in osteoporosis therapy, specifically on treatment duration and follow-up after treatment discontinuation will be discussed. Nevertheless, we would like to draw your attention on the always well received ECTS/ASBMR debate where the two societies compete by swaying the opinions of the audience to favor or reject a motion central in the bone field. In this session, two excellent speakers will give an educational and entertaining duel on the evidence of intervention thresholds in patients with imminent fracture risk.
Each day, we will also present a Basic Science Workshop, in which renowned speakers present the most recent advances in hot topic areas of investigation. One Workshop will focus on the bone marrow environment and stromal cell lineages. A second session will introduce the latest on extracellular vesicles from the basics onto applications in bone repair, in partnership with the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV). A third cutting-edge basic science workshop will be a joint session with the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS-EU), in which you will learn more about the fundamentals of skeletal stem cells and anabolic strategies for bone repair and regeneration.
In parallel, Clinical Workshops will be presented each day including topics such as the often-neglected transition process of common genetic syndromes from childhood to adulthood and will answer the question whether secondary osteoporosis is truly reversible. Furthermore, deep learning approaches for estimation of fracture risk through artificial intelligence will be presented as a cutting-edge topic of growing relevance.
ECTS@Home series – a full range of educational sessions (October-December 2020)
In addition to ECTS 2020 Digital, we offer the ECTS@Home series of educational sessions running every week from October to December 2020. The ECTS@Home program brings an outstanding set of speakers and exciting topics straight to your home or office. Furthermore, the ECTS 2020 “On Demand” option offers you the opportunity to watch these sessions on demand at a time convenient to you.
One of the key points of attention of the Basic/Translational ECTS@Home program will be new technology developments. Keeping track of the emerging and rapidly advancing basic science technologies is a cornerstone of innovative research, hence we wish to give you profound opportunities to catch-up on the advances in single-cell level transcriptomics, integrative data analysis and deep-tissue confocal microscopy, all designed to allow high-resolution skeletal analyses at the cellular and molecular levels. A second hallmark will be to look at the skeleton as a broad functional unit with integrated compartments exerting diverse interactions and influences on each other as well as communicating with other organ systems. Stay tuned for these Basic Science Update Technology and Biology sessions that will be held at the end of November. Additional interactive information exchange is facilitated by the basic Meet the Expert sessions. An extra novelty this year is the Bone Tissue Engineering workshop (14 October) in which fundamental concepts, challenges and opportunities for bone regeneration applications will be discussed.
The Clinical ECTS@Home sessions will give the possibility to update yourself on various clinical conditions and research questions which we are confronted with in everyday practice. In the clinical Meet the Expert sessions you will have the opportunity to interact with your peers on topics such as atypical femoral fractures, pregnancy-induced osteoporosis, renal bone disease and deep learning approaches focusing on radiology-based machine learning. State-of-the-art lectures will be given on the management of hyperparathyroidism and a Clinical Update session jointly organized with AHP will focus on the evidence of fall and fracture prevention by means other than pharmacotherapy.
And last but not least, ECTS@Home also integrates i) the French National Day, the Basic and Clinical Working groups, the ECTS/IFMRS joint session on the knowledge portal network and the ECTS/ICCBH Expert Forum on Genetic Defects in infancy to adulthood in October, ii) the well-known and highly appreciated ECTS-Mellanby Training Course on diagnostic tests for osteoporosis focusing on the clinical use of bone turnover markers and the East Meets West Expert Forum on the dysmobility syndrome in November, iii) the AHP session on osteoporosis and the Joint ECTS/ERA-EDTA – CKD-MBD Workshop on mineral and bone disorder in chronic kidney diseases in December.
We hope this virtual congress will immerse you in the warmth of a collegial and top-science event, despite the unfortunate worldwide Covid-19 situation. We are dedicated towards bringing the newest scientific information and an excellent educational program within a vibrant virtual environment. Your contribution and active participation will enrich the program with exciting oral communications and poster sessions, vibrant discussions, and online opportunities for brainstorming among experts and peers with similar interests.
You can explore the Scientific Programme in full on the ECTS Congress website.
With collegial regards,
Christa Maes and Chris Meier for the ECTS 2020 Scientific Program Committee team