Gothenburg, Sweden: 3rd symposium of the International Cartilage Repair Society

Abstract

This meeting in Sweden was attended by just under 600 delegates from all over the world. Although we were warned that it could be cool during the conference, the temperature was as high as 338C on the Thursday, and was sunny and warm for the whole meeting. There were 12 sessions and five workshops throughout the whole meeting. The session topics ranged from cartilage development, matrix biology and pathology, induction of cartilage, clinical and experimental cartilage repair, patello]femoral injuries, osteochondritis dissecans, tissue engineering, evaluation and traumatic cartilage injury and its relation to osteoarthritis. The workshops were led by experts in the fields of cartilage histology preparation, culturing techniques, resurfacing in the ankle, MRI of cartilage, and regulatory aspects. While all of this was taking place, a large hall at the congress centre housed 163 posters on all of the subjects mentioned above. This was also the first attempt by the ICRS to try and place all the posters on the society website for members to download, but only approximately onethird produced their posters in the correct format for the internet. The presentations in the main congress hall were also transmitted live through the society’s web site, although my family in England found the image poor and the sound very difficult to hear. An analysis at the end of the meeting revealed over 1500 hits of people logging on during the conference proceedings: over 500 from the UK, 500 from the US and the remaining from the rest of the world. There was an opportunity to e-mail questions to the presenters after their presentations but this was not greatly utilised. A few questions were relayed during the live surgery of the repair of an osteochondral lesion on the medial femoral chondyle using autologous chondrocytes, as performed by Lars Peterson, which proved to be a very good instructional aspect of the whole meeting. The use of a live internet broadcast during the symposium raised many questions at the annual general meeting of the society, particularly the legal aspects of disclosing intellectual property, which might put presenters off coming as it is difficult to give away sensitive information of clinical and experimental reŽ . search to the public domain i.e. the internet . Some sessions were run in parallel, which had its drawbacks, as there were many papers at these sessions that I, and many others, would have liked to have heard, but couldn’t. There was plenty of time to stroll around the posters and the commercial stands, which were adjacent to each other, and many contacts and discussions took place during these sessions. The symposium dinner was a bus journey away at a large concert hall on an island to the north of Gothenburg, where we were treated to a superb sunset over the sea, and dancing into the late hours. Overall, I found this to be an excellent meeting, with many contacts made and new ideas seen on the posters and the commercial exhibits. At the AGM of