The first European congress on microbial biofilms: EUROBIOFILMS 2009, Rome, Italy, September 2–5, 2009

Abstract

The Congress Center of the Santa Lucia Foundation Research Hospital in Rome, Italy, was the venue from September 2–5, 2009 of the First European Congress on Microbial Biofilms — EUROBIOFILMS 2009, providing the participants with a valuable forum for a fruitful scientific exchange in the field of microbial biofilms (Fig. 1). Figure 1 The 500-seat congress hall of the Santa Lucia Foundation during EUROBIOFILMS 2009. The original proposal to organize such a conference dates back to the Executive Board meeting of the newly established Study Group on Biofilms (ESGB) of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID), held in Copenhagen on April 2005. On that occasion, as Member-elect, Gianfranco Donelli highlighted the program of the First Workshop on Microbial Biofilms that he was organizing at the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome, June 2005, and proposed to hold a European congress on biofilms under the ESCMID umbrella in the future. During these years, in addition to the above-mentioned workshop (attended by 223 participants, mostly from Italy), three international conferences on biofilms, known as Biofilm I, II and III, were held in Germany (Osnabruck, 2004; Leipzig, 2006; Munich, 2008). However, each of these scientific events was attended mostly by participants from the organizing country. Thus, the idea to organize a large conference in Europe as a counterpart to the four Biofilm Conferences previously sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology represented a difficult, but exciting challenge. In fact, the recognition of a Congress as European should not be based only on its occurrence in a European country, but requires the involvement as much as possible of scientists from the different European countries, including the members of the Organizing and Scientific Committees as well as the invited speakers. Further, the most important European Organizations in the field of microbiology, …