10th Bertine Koperberg Conference

Dear Colleague,

This is an invitation to participate in the 10th Bertine Koperberg Conference, being held in Egmond aan Zee, the Netherlands, from Thursday 13th until Saturday 15th of April on the theme Molecular Fingerprinting of auto-immune disease: from environment to cell.

Bertine Koperberg was the daughter of a Dutch jewish family that survived the second world war in exile. As a young woman she suffered from an unknown connective tissue disease and died at the age of 31 years. Her family decided to start a foundation to improve education and research on connective tissue diseases.

A board of directors was formed under the leadership of Bert Feltkamp, professor of autoimmunity in Amsterdam. That board decided to organize conferences in the field of connective tissue diseases, and so the Bertine Koperberg Conferences started.?The first conference was organized in May 1975, on the theme: “Significance of determination of anti-DNA and DNA / Anti DNA complexes”. These small sized conferences had two aims:

1. to function as a think tank: in which direction should research in the field of connective tissue diseases be moving?

2. to stimulate interaction between established researchers with young upcoming researchers in this field.

Young scientists working in the field of translational immunology / rheumatology are very welcome to submit their application now to info@sickco.nl with a short CV and the abstract of the work aimed to present; this registration closes 15th of February.

The conference is for invited guests only; we are aiming at a mix of young upcoming researchers in the field of auto-immunity and established researchers. Please see the preliminary program below. In addition to the speakers mentioned well known (“established”) researchers will be participating during the whole congress, such as Prof.dr. G. Krönke and Prof.dr. C.D. Buckley. We firmly believe that the interaction between both groups is crucial for this conference; therefore we would appreciate your stay throughout the whole conference, from Thursday 13th afternoon until Saturday 15th noon. The costs of the meeting, including all meals and lodging are limited to 125 Euro.

The Conference will be held in Hotel Zuiderduin, Egmond aan Zee, the Netherlands, about 45 minutes from Schiphol Airport.

Hans Bijlsma, Tom Huizinga, Frans Kroese, Diane van der Woude, Alexander Leijdesdorff and Sander Tas

Programma