The Society
More than 35,000 clinicians, scientists and allied health professionals from over 160 countries are part of the ERS community
Become an ERS member
The 22nd ERS Lung Science Conference is an essential event for budding respiratory researchers looking to boost their careers, offering a unique opportunity to network with peers from across the globe. It will present cutting-edge abstracts on novel experimental and translational lung research.
Prof. Silke Meiners, ERS Conferences and Research Seminars Director, and Prof. Rory Morty are two of the programme coordinators for the ERS Lung Science Conference 2024; here, they give us a preview of the ERS Lung Science Conference 2024.
Watch the video or read more from Silke and Rory below.
Silke Meiners: The Lung Science Conference is the flagship event for the basic scientists at the ERS. We include translational topics, and in 2024 the theme will be ‘development of chronic lung disease from life spanning mechanisms to preventive therapies’.
We aim to integrate basic scientists, clinicians and clinical scientists to really bridge the gap and bring those people together in a pretty unique setting. It’s a wonderful venue and a small meeting with a fantastic atmosphere. It’s a beautiful conference, but I’m biased!
Rory Morty: The Lung Science Conference is intended to take a focused look at a very particular theme that is very topical in lung biology and lung medicine. It’s a wonderful opportunity for discussion and a chance for early career researchers and those more senior to meet and interact, with networking events, mentoring events and sessions.
RM: This year, we have particularly addressed a theme that relates not just to chronic lung diseases, but the origins of chronic lung diseases. So, for example, in the period of childhood or immediately after birth, if something happens to an individual or a patient specifically with their lungs, how does this impact later life? There is an increasing appreciation for the fact that most adult lung diseases have their roots in the childhood period.
SM: First of all, it’s not dedicated to one disease; we have multiple diseases included and experts from different fields. We also really try to combine basic mechanisms such as early life development, early origins of disease, genetic susceptibilities, lifetime exposure, reactivation of molecular developmental pathways in disease, ageing and much more.
From basic research findings, we can also deduce potential therapies. And of course, that’s what we would like to do. We would like to make the conference attractive for clinicians as well.
RM: Every delegate gets a lot out of it, including established investigators or early career members. However, the event is specifically targeted towards early career members. That includes students, PhD students, medical students, or junior postdocs, residents. It’s a small conference, which means the capacity for dialogue and for networking is very easy. I would come to the Lung Science Conference because not only can you discuss your favourite disease or how it may evolve, but you can also network with peers and experts in the field.
SM: We have lots of early career members attending. Most abstracts are presented as posters, but we also have selected abstracts for oral presentations and we have an early investigator session. There are also a couple of awards which is nice! I think these are the highlights for the early career members of ERS and also of other scientific communities that are welcome to participate.
SM: I am really looking forward to the atmosphere of the conference, meeting people, interacting with our new members and early career members of the societies. What I like also is that so many different disciplines come together – we will have life-spanning trajectories of diseases as one of the main topics and as a result, we will have epidemiologists talking to molecular biologists, talking to clinicians. It really is the aim to bring people together on a certain topic that don’t usually meet.
RM: The theme is very, very important because child doctors and paediatricians are getting together with adult doctors to consider pooling resources and ideas to figure out if we could limit the development of adult lung disease, or prevent it altogether when we know that there is a trigger in early life that will result in a serious or ultimately fatal lung disease in late life.
That is why this type of meeting is so important – we truly have an opportunity to consider preventative measures to prevent lung disease in adult life.
SM: We always have dedicated talks from clinicians at the Lung Science Conference, mainly on Sunday morning. This year, again we will have a wrap-up discussion with the faculty onsite and try to figure out what the gaps in knowledge are, what do we need to do to really make this knowledge and research available to the clinicians.
The Lung Science Conference is part of the translational science initiative we have started this year at ERS. It’s part of a bigger scheme where we try to bring basic and clinical science together to apply results obtained within basic research to the clinic – translating them into clinical practice – as well as translate results from clinical practice back to the bench side.
We would like to invite the clinicians to attend the Sunday morning sessions; we will have a day pass for the hybrid meeting. So that is something that is pretty important – I would like to invite everyone to join in and see how this works.
Register for the Lung Science Conference.
Learn more about the Lung Science Conference Sunday morning pass.
Register for the ERS Lung Science Conference 2024.
For information about the event, visit the Lung Science Conference 2024 homepage.