The Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society World meeting 2015 was an incredible experience for all of us (Agnieszka, Inés and myself) from both a personal and professional viewpoint.
We arrived at the conference for the welcome reception and first poster session where I had the opportunity to present work by Jon Dawson and David Gibbs on clay nanoparticles and BMP (photo). It was a great experience and lots of people came by showing great interest in Laponite, which Dan and Inés are also working on.
We all had the great chance to attend to Prof Robert “Bob” Langer’s lecture (photo) who is known around the world as the ‘father of tissue engineering’ and has published over 1,280 articles (check out this very nice video http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/scientists-you-must-know/robert-langer.aspx).
Among the other keynote speakers was Dr Molly Stevens presenting a range of interesting work currently undertaken in her lab and Dr Anthony Atala who showed very exciting clinical data on the translational application of tissue engineering products.
Agnieszka and Inés did an amazing job with their presentations and a lot of people came around to talk about Wnt signalling and the CAM assay. I’m sure they enjoyed presenting their work to people from all around the world (photo).
My talk was placed in the ‘Nanostructured Biomaterials and Functional Surfaces’ session (part 2). The chairs were Dr Nuno Neves and Dr Lui L. Reis who are both pioneers of bone and cartilage tissue engineering in Portugal. I was very happy with my presentation, I was challenged on some aspects of my work, but I did my best to answer the questions fully. The overall quality of the conference was very high and being able to present my work on polymersomes for bone repair in such a competitive environment was a great experience (photo).
After the conference, we had the opportunity to go around Boston and New York for a few days trying to be proper tourists. One of my highlights was whale watching in Boston – it was fantastic.
Now it is time to get back to work, fully motivated with the belief that the research that we are doing in the lab has really great potential!
Edo