As many of you know, Liz and I attended the 2004 biennial International Congress on Autoimmunity in Budapest, where we presented the paper "Sarcoidosis succumbs to antibiotics - implications for autoimmune disease"
I was talking with one of my colleagues from that organization about upcoming conferences, and he mentioned that they would love to run a session on "VDR, Vit D and Immune Disease" at their conference in September 2008, but that they had been unable to find a corporate sponsor for it.
There will be 2000 delegates next year at Porto, it is huge, so the conference is not run by volunteers, like ours, but by a professional organization (the same one that did such a good job in Budapest).
The conference will be covered by the journals “Autoimmunity Reviews”, “J. Autoimmunity”, “Autoimmunity” and “Ann NY Acad of Science”.
To cut a long story short, the Board of Directors of the Autoimmunity Research Foundation has decided to provide an Academic Sponsorship so that the session on VDR can go ahead. I will be chairing the session, and making a presentation, and Dr Greg Blaney will also be making a presentation. We will be putting an effort into getting as many of our colleagues as possible to submit papers for this scientific session.
Now we just have to raise the money We have until next June to do so
We have started up a new website to act as a focus for our fundraising activities. You can find it at http://FriendsofARF.org
That site is for discussion of ways to raise donations, possible benefactors, and all the sordid money-related topics that we need to keep away from the study site, so as not to run the risk of conflicting our scientific efforts.
We have until next June to do so
