Upon completion of this conference, participants should be able to: understand the most current and important aspects of hypoxia research generally; appreciate current understanding of relationships between hypoxia and angiogenesis; understand the relationship between oxygen sensing and metabolic function, particularly as it relates to cell and tissue survival during hypoxic injury; appreciate current thinking on the role of oxygen sensing and hypoxic response in ischemic injuries, such as stroke and myocardial infarction; gain an understanding of current ideas about the molecular sensing and signaling mechanisms induced by hypoxia; understand the developmental roles oxygen sensing fulfill in model organisms, and gain insights into how these are relevant to human biology/pathology. A chief objective will be to bring the very disparate groups that work on hypoxia together. There is currently no other meeting where this occurs, and it will allow, we believe, unprecedented opportunities for cross-fertilization and collaboration to occur. A number of controversies on the mechanisms and effects of oxygen exist in the current literature; this meeting will bring the various points of view into the same setting and will allow a consensus on these issues to be built. In particular, hypoxia impacts and is studied in the fields of physiology, cardiology, and oncology; the workers in these fields rarely attend the same forums, and yet, the molecular mechanisms of oxygen response are revealing themselves to be similar in many of the experimental systems utilized by these disciplines. This meeting will allow students at an early stage of training to understand and appreciate the crosstalk that can and should exist not only within but among diverse fields, and will allow students to gain a full appreciation of the issues that currently exist in hypoxia research. Although there are meetings dedicated to a number of the issues that arise in hypoxia-induced diseases, there are no others where students will be exposed to a diversity of views of the problems and approaches in current hypoxia research with the diversity represented at this meeting. ? ?
