INFLAMMATION: A Key to Common Complex Diseases.
Deadline for application 2007-04-24, but has been extended.

The goal of Baltic Summer School 2007 is to address the emerging understanding of inflammatory mechanisms as the key mechanism underlying large common but complex diseases. This is well known in autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and in allergic diseases like asthma but is now also accepted in diseases like atherosclerosis, psoriasis and Alzheimer. Future translation of new key scientific findings to clinical reality will require understanding of the basic inflammatory process.

The Baltic Summer School is supported by the EU under the Marie Curie Program which has a special focus on young scientists with research experience at the late phase of their PhD studies as well as at the medical specialist or post-doc levels.

Detailed information and registration information available on the BSS website.

Theoretical Course, 2-13 September 2007, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden.

Worldwide experts will present the current knowledge within the following fields:

# Evolution and ontogeny of the inflammatory response (Parham, Martin, Cuzzocrea, Normark, Bontrop, Gyllensten and Lindahl)

# The inflammatory syndrome in man and animal models for human inflammatory diseases (Sakaguchi, Barton, Hansson, Feldmann, Cookson, Schreiber, Scharffetter-Kochanek, Theofilopoulos, Lötvall, Amor, Tarkowski, T'Hart, Svejgaard and Issazadeh-Navikas)

# Genetic approaches on human inflammatory diseases (Lindbladh-Toh, Kere, Lernmark, Olsson, Alarcon Riquelme and Nilsson)

# Mimicking human diseases using genetic approaches on animals (Wakeland, Andersson, Johannesson, Ibrahim, David, Leiter and Holmdahl)

# Innate and adaptive immunity and inflammatory effector mechanisms (Stockinger, van den Berg, Schumann, Kabelitz, Trouw, Schröder, van Kooyk, Garside, Holländer, Radbruch, Sollid, Becher, Segal, Schütze, Bulfone-Paus, Blom, Svanborg, Leanderson and Agace)

# Prediction, monitoring and new preventive and therapeutic treatment strategies and targets for inflammatory diseases (Rose-John, Zendman, Burkhardt, Verweij, Wahren-Herlenius, Heinegård, Morgan, Hultqvist, Jansson, Saxne and Lund)

The Honorary Lecture will be given by Prof. Shimon Sakaguchi on Regulatory T cells.

Invited speakers will participate in panel discussions. Course participants are expected to present posters on their work.

Laboratory Course, 17- 21 September 2007, Universities of Lund, Kiel and Copenhagen

20 of the young scientists participating in the theoretical course (which have been selected for a BSS 2007-stipend) will also have the opportunity to train in well-established research laboratories. The participants will join on-going research projects using state-of-the-art techniques ranging from genetic analysis of arthritis and multiple sclerosis models, detection of autoantigens and complement functions, T and B cell function in vitro and epitopes in inflammation, signal transduction in T cells, cytokine receptors and cytokine signaling in inflammation, function and signalling of intracellular pathogen receptors, characterisation of antimicrobial peptides and host parasite interactions.