This application requests support to convene a full-day symposium during the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) to be held May 6-10, 2016 in San Diego, California. This full day symposium will continue our highly successful symposium series, the Basic Sciences Symposium, which has been held annually since 2009. The topic for the 2016 Basic Sciences Symposium (BSS) is The Microbiome in Urologic Health and Disease, and the symposium will be held on Friday, May 6, 2016 from 8am to 5:30pm in the San Diego Convention Center, with an anticipated attendance of 400-500 including leaders in the field of microbiome research, leading urology researchers, urologists, and early-career investigators. The support would provide travel awards for approximately 20 early-career investigators to attend the symposium. The purpose of this meeting is to provide a broad perspective on the current state of the developing field of microbiome-related research, educate AUA attendees on successful microbiome research approaches being conducted in disciplines outside of urology, highlight relevant studies in urologic disease, and identify opportunities for future investigation with an interest in fostering more basic and translational research in this area. Two keynote and seventeen additional speakers have been invited to provide presentations and answer questions in sessions including Potentiating the Impact of Microbiome Research; Advancing Urology Through Microbiome Research; the Microbiome in Understanding, Preventing, and Treating UTIs; the Microbiome in Chronic Pelvic Pain; and the Microbiome in Urinary Stone Disease. We will recruit participation of early-career investigators, especially minorities and women, to this outstanding program. The Principal Investigator for this symposium project is Carolyn Best, PhD, the Director of Research (Office of Research) for the American Urological Association. The Program Planning Committee Chair is Jill Macoska, PhD, Director of the Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy and Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Massachusetts. Planning Committee members include: Rosalyn Adam, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Director of Urology Research at Boston Children's Hospital; Arthur L. Burnett, II, MD, MBA, Patrick C. Walsh Distinguished Professor of Urology, Director of the Basic Science Laboratory in Neurourology, Director of the Sexual Medicine Fellowship Program, and Faculty Member of the Cellular and Molecular Medicine Graduate Training Program of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions; Toby C. Chai, MD, Vice-chair of Research in the Department of Urology and Co-Director of the Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery clinical program at Yale University-New Haven Hospital; John Lieske, MD, Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Director of the O'Brien Urology Research Center at the Mayo Clinic; Aria Olumi, MD, AUA Chair of Research, Attending Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Urology, and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School; and Daniel Shoskes, MD, Attending Urologist at the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at Cleveland Clinic and Professor of Surgery, Cleveland Lerner College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University. A robust plan is in place for publicizing the conference and the support by NIDDK, should it be granted.
On May 6, 2016, the American Urological Association (AUA) Office of Research will offer a Basic Sciences Symposium, entitled 'The Microbiome in Urologic Health and Disease,' which will be held in conjunction with the AUA Annual Meeting. The microbiome, the totality of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses that inhabit the human body, has become a research area of great interest over the past decade. In 2007, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), whose mission is to generate resources to enable researchers to characterize the human microbiome and analyze its role in human health and disease. Since then, this effort has led to the characterization of microbial communities found at several different sites on the human body: nasal passages, oral cavity, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and urogenital tract, the last of which has since catalyzed the beginnings of microbiome analysis in urologic research. Therefore, this symposium will include expert speakers from disciplines both inside and outside of urology. Urologic health and disease topics selected to highlight the breadth of studies on the role of microbiome in urology include incontinence, chronic pelvic pain, urinary stone disease, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), urinary tract infections (UTIs), and diet and nutrition, among others, which are each expected to be of significant interest to practicing urologists, who represent the majority of AUA Annual Meeting attendees. The symposium will provide a rigorous and in-depth consideration of this area of urologic research that will both spur progress in understanding benign urologic conditions and facilitate interactions and collaborations that will promote a better understanding of the contributions of the microbiome to causing or preventing urologic diseases.
