Dear Members,
In less than two months we will be convening our seventh annual G-CAN Research Symposium and Early Career Investigator Awards. Although the current situation with Covid requires us once again to meet virtually, we have a robust agenda planned, with an excellent panel of speakers from across the globe who will be presenting a diverse list of topics in gout, hyperuricemia and crystal-associated diseases. Additionally, we have provided several opportunities for networking in smaller groups, and although we will miss the face-to-face conversations that an in-person event offers, we hope this will allow for some productive conversations and idea sharing.
The symposium will start October 18, with on-demand, pre-recorded video/audio webcasts made available online. The live, virtual general session will be held Friday, October 22 and features Early Career Investigator Award lectures, the Crystal Deposition Disease Mini Symposium and an update on our G-CAN sponsored projects, including the Gout Common Nomenclature project, which has generated several publications in the past year. A draft version of the full agenda can be found here, or on the G-CAN Website.
Lastly, the Board of Directors wishes to congratulate this year’s winners of the Early Career Investigator Awards. Once again, we had close to 30 excellent abstract submissions, the highest ranked of these receiving the Ralph H. Schumacher Memorial Award presented to Victoria Halperin Kuhns, PhD, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland (see below). Five more abstracts were selected for oral presentations at the live general session and 16 for on-demand, pre-recorded poster presentations. Those selected for oral presentations are:
1.Isidoro Cobo, PhD; University of California San Diego School of Medicine, USA. Monosodium urate crystals regulate a unique JNK-dependent macrophage metabolic and inflammatory response.
- Natalie McCormick, PhD; Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA. Novel causal metabolomic predictors of incident gout: A population-based, prospective study of UK Biobank participants.
- NingNing Liang, PhD candidate; Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health CAS, China. High fat promotes hepatic uric acid synthesis primarily through up-regulating purine salvage pathways.
- Lindsay Helget, MD;University of Nebraska Medical Center, USA. Mortality in patients with undertreated gout in the Veteran’s Health Administration: A retrospective cohort study.
- Xiaoting Chen, MD; Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital, China. Thyroid hormone regulated-expression of Period2 promotes liver urate production.
We hope you can join us for both the on-demand presentations and the live virtual session on October 22 from 10:00 to 15:00 Pacific Daylight Time. This schedule should allow symposium participants from various time zones to attend, and we hope to see a record attendance at this year’s event. We encourage everyone to register as soon as possible, using the registration button below. Feel free to share this registration link with your colleagues.
Sincerely,
Robert Terkeltaub, MD, President
Hyon Choi, MD, Dph, Vice-President and Treasurer