The seventeenth Annual Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) Consortium Meeting is scheduled for March 17-19, 2011, at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. The overall objectives of the annual meeting are to facilitate interactions between scientists and clinicians studying the BBB and the central nervous system (CNS), and to help translate basic and preclinical research advances into clinical trials in neuro-oncology and neurology. Every meeting spotlights one or two research areas in which advances may impact brain delivery, brain imaging, or brain tumor therapy.
The specific aims of the 2011 meeting are:
Specific Aim 1. The impact of cancer therapies on cognition and quality of life. We will discuss treatment effects of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and combined modality approaches on cognition and quality of life, in patients with malignant brain tumors and systemic cancers as well, and new approaches to abrogate the adverse effects of treatment.
Specific Aim 2. The brain as an immunologically and pharmacologically privileged site, and CNS disease as a manifestation of BBB breakdown. The major foci will be the role of inflammation in brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, cerebrovascular disease and CNS genetic disease.
Specific Aim 3. Advancing BBB Consortium clinical research, including updates on current clinical trials, development of new clinical research protocols, and planning of translational protocols to bring research from the lab to the clinic. The meeting will emphasize keynote presentations and brief podium presentations by world-renowned experts followed by large group discussions, as well as panel discussions and poster sessions. In future years of this ongoing meeting we plan to continue to discuss current issues, recent advances and future directions in basic science, preclinical, and clinical research in the fields of cerebrovascular biology, tumor imaging and therapy, and BBB physiology. Dissemination of meeting findings to the scientific community is a major goal of the BBB meeting. During the previous funding period we published five meeting report/review articles, a summary report of the 2009 BBB meeting is under review at Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and a report from the March 2010 meeting is underway. The target population for the BBB Consortium meeting includes academic, industry, and NIH clinicians and researchers with research programs in the BBB and neuro- oncology, with a particular emphasis on translational research. We actively recruit and encourage the participation of young, minority, and women clinicians and scientists. Since the last renewal we have increased our attempts to include new BBB researchers, young investigators, post doctoral and graduate students, minority scientists, as well as disabled scientists, particularly those with hearing impairment. This annual BBB meeting will continue to provide a forum for translational BBB and CNS research and the development of new clinical trials to improve outcomes in brain tumors and CNS disease.
The overall objectives of the annual Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) Consortium Meeting are to help translate basic and preclinical research advances into clinical trials in neuro-oncology and neurology. This annual BBB meeting will continue to provide a forum for translational BBB and CNS research and the development of new clinical trials to improve outcomes in brain tumors and CNS disease.
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