6a. Conf. Internacional em Heme-Oxigenase

Post de Nivea Luz

The 6th Internacional Conferece in Heme Oxygenase (HO) was held from September 30th to October 4th, 2009 in Miami Beach–FL-USA. The meeting was organized by Dr Anupam Agarwal, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The trend of the general discussion set by Dr. Agarwal in his opening remarks, was for the need for such meetings and for more collaboration between scientists and new researchers.

The program contemplated thematic sessions, oral presentations and poster sessions. In total, 199 members from diverse countries attended the meeting, 131 abstracts were presented as posters and 12 qualified for oral presentations. The scientific committee arranged excellent scientific sessions, besides great Welcome and Farewell receptions.

A marker of the meeting was the quality of the works presented and organization. I learned a lot about many interesting and important subjects on the heme oxygenase system, like:Hypoxia and Stem Cells presented by M. Celeste Simon (University of Pennsylvania, USA);Regulation of cell death by free heme, presented by Miguel Soares (Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal); Heme oxygenase-1 and DNA Repair presented by Barbara Wegiel (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA); Mechanisms of iron regulation/sensing presented by Martina Muckenthaler (Heidelberg, Germany); and many more …

The attending Brazilians were:

1. •Dr. Marcelo Bozza from UFRJ participated in the session on “Novel and emerging activities of heme” and talked about “Regulation of inflammation by free heme”.
   

2. •Daniel Garcia dos Santos (Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and UFRGS) presented a poster entitled “Does Heme Oxygenase 1 play a role in erythroid differentiation?”
   

3. •Kikumi Ozaki (Department of Surgery – Unniversity of Pittsburgh) presented a poster on the “Effect of carbon monoxide (CO) in preventing mitochondrial damage and apoptosis during renal warm ischemia and subsequent cold storage and improve renal function in a model of non-heart-beating donor kidney grafts”.
   

I enjoyed very much the opportunity to present my poster on the “Role of heme oxygenase 1 in response to murine macrophages infection by Leishmania chagasi”, and received helpful feedback. The presentations gave me lots of ideas about future approaches to my study, and gave me a better understanding of the wide range of methodologies used to study the role of heme oxygenase in several experimental models.

In brief, my attendance at the conference was both an enjoyable and beneficial experience and I returned with renewed enthusiasm.

I look forward to being at the 7th International Conference in Heme Oxygenase in 2011, which is being planned for the UK.