Voice of the President #4
Hello fellow ICRS members!
As we are well into Spring and on the way to Summer there is a lot of activity to report to you. One thing I missed in my last correspondence to you was the following: I would like to congratulate Brian Cole, MD MBA on winning the OREF Clinical Research Award for 25 years of Orthopaedic research in Osteochondral Allograft Transplantation, which was presented at the annual meeting of the AAOS. Outstanding kudos to you Brian and your team for this impressive body of work and we also thank you for all the work you do for our society on our Board, special projects and other committees.
Interest in cartilage biology, repair and joint preservation are increasing across the globe especially in Spain where they have recently organized a Spanish cartilage club under the leadership of Joan Freitas, MD. The Executive Board [EB] is working with them to have an affiliation with ICRS. We congratulate them on organizing and they certainly have the critical mass of expertise in Spain to have a vibrant cartilage club.
The upcoming World Congress coming to Boston this October has been expertly spearheaded by our Scientific Program Committee ChairsSimon Görtz, MD and Sylvia Nürnberger, Ph.D. The program is both innovative and exciting and there are many new presenters with an eye toward state of the art in joint preservation. It will feature many speakers presenting for the first time with new data to support our mission. There will also be a speed mentoring session integrated into the program organised by the Translational Research Committee (TRC) for young investigators looking to make there way in our field. We look forward to seeing you all there and catching up over the course of the congress.
The TRC has been prolific in putting together a series of webinars that should pique the interest in many of us and I would encourage you all to have a look at them especially the entrepreneur series with the next one scheduled for June 10 and presented by current ORS president Suzanne Maher, Ph.D., founder of AGelity Biomechanics.
I had the pleasure of attending the NextGen retreat held at the Rizzoli institute in Bologna, Italy on April 11-12, organized by Ignacio Dallo, MD, Alessandro Di Martino, MD and Giuseppe Filardo, MD, PhD, MBA and was highly impressed with our NextGen presentations: they were of high quality and spanned the breadth of cartilage repair and joint preservation. They truly represent the future of our society, and it is bright! We had four EB members present at this event and showed great support for our young members.
Following this trip, I moved on to Utrecht in the Netherlands for the 6th ICRS Lab Skills Course which was a tour de force of current excellent protocols for doing everything from chondrocyte isolation, 3-D bioprinting, to grading cartilage repair by histology. I commend our 2nd VP Jos Malda, Ph.D. and Roel Custers, MD, Ph.D. for putting together a fantastic program and all the faculty at UMC for a memorable meeting that was fully enrolled.
As we approach the congress in October the upcoming new slate for the EB will be selected by our Nomination Committee. This process has begun and is headed by our past president Christoph Erggelet, MD. We have received letters of intent from several members who seek posts on the EB. I believe this demonstrates a vibrant interest by our membership to be involved in and committed to our goals as a society and wish all of them the best in their desire to shape the future of the ICRS.
Daniel A. Grande, Ph.D.
ICRS President 2023 – 2025
