As you prepare your travel plans for Liverpool, let me tell you a little bit about what happens on the Pre-Congress Friday in our 50th ECTS Congress. The Pre-Congress day has a huge and varied collection of sessions, some of them focused on special interest areas and others being broadly educational or covering large subject areas. First, alongside the ECTS Meeting, the BRS annual meeting, for which one can register with or without also taking part in ECTS 2023, has sessions all day Friday. Within the ECTS 2023, the Friday offers fantastic collaborative sessions arranged jointly with the ICCBH, CABS, and the ISBM.
There is also a number of Open Fora independently organized by groups of ECTS members who want to dive deeper into specific areas of research or practice. For example bone involvement in rare rheumatic diseases, with Ulrike Baschant, Christian Hedrich and Tim Rolvien. Like many other Open Fora, this session includes an opportunity from hearing presentations from selected abstracts. Other Open Fora include Management of vertebral fragility fractures in practice, a session with UK based experts in the field. The FIDELIO research network present a session on Type 1 and 2 diabetes and bone health, and another session brings you a team of paediatric and adult endocrinologists to discuss genotype-phenotype correlation and familial variability in Hypophosphatasia. Other sessions are specifically dedicated to advances in imaging and to advances in animal models, including a session on animal models to study cellular crosstalk. A full list of the Friday Open Fora can be found in the scientific programme section of our ECTS 2023 website.
The Friday also hosts the very popular Mellanby Training Course, which will cover Identification of Vertebral Fractures. The Mellanby Course on bone turnover markers was part of last year’s ECTS congress and will like make a reappearance in one of our upcoming congresses. The ECTS Academy Synergy and New Investigator session is the only evening session of the Pre-congress programme this year. This popular session is an excellent opportunity for new investigators to expand their informal research network and meet new investigators from other countries and other fields.
I hope you will consider also registering for the Friday sessions – there is certainly something for everyone and it is a lovely way to start our 50th congress.