It is only 5 days until the 2009 NF Conference gets underway in Portland Oregon. The Foundation has been organizing an annual professional neurofibromatosis meeting for over 20 years, and 2009 sees our biggest attendance ever of over 250 physicians and researchers from around the world. The 2009 program runs June 13-16, and opens with a full afternoon of presentations on NF clinical trials and an update on the Foundation’s NF Preclinical Consortium for preclinical drug screening. This is a far cry from just 5 years ago when the agenda was almost exclusively basic research and is a testament to how rapidly NF research is progressing towards finding effective drug therapies.
In 2008 the Foundation reintroduced the Friedrich von Recklinghausen Award, which had in years earlier been given to a researcher or physician to recognize outstanding contributions to NF research or clinical care. In 2009 the honor will go to Dr. Luis Parada(University of Texas, Southwestern). Dr. Parada has made groundbreaking achievements in many areas of research ranging from tuberous sclerosis to autism but his contributions to NF have been truly significant. These commenced with his seminal finding on Ras gene function while a first-year graduate student with Dr. Robert Weinberg at MIT, and continue until last month when he published a paper on his group the very first genetic mouse model of NF1-related dermal neurofibromas. While we are fairly certain Dr. Parada has many more discoveries ahead of him, 2009 seems a fitting year to step back and recognize his contributions to date to unraveling neurofibromatosis.
Foundation staff Garrett Gleeson and myself will be blogging from the NF Conference, so please be sure to bookmark this page and check back daily!
