Dear ASGT members and colleagues:

The American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) Board of Directors and Program Committee would like to thank all of the people - trainees, investigators, exhibitors and attendees - who made the 11th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Gene Therapy in Boston, Massachusetts such a success. The Program Committee did an outstanding job organizing a meeting at which almost 2000 attendees were exposed to over 1200 presentations covering the entire field of gene therapy. There obviously was a lot to see and hear at the meeting in Boston.

In a meeting with many outstanding presentations, several stood out. The Presidential Symposium (Jude Samulski, PhD; Luigi Naldini, MD, PhD; Fredrick Bushman, PhD; and Xandra Breakfield, PhD), the Outstanding New Investigator Symposium (Karen Aboody, MD; Maciej Lesniak, MD, FACS; and Dmitry Shayakhmetov, PhD) and the plenary abstract session featuring 6 young ASGT trainees, all described the newest discoveries in the basic science of gene therapy as well as major advances in translational and clinical gene therapy.

Other highlights included the announcement of successful gene therapy for Leber Congenital Amaurosis by groups from Philadelphia, Florida and the United Kingdom, and advances in the treatment of liver and head and neck cancer presented by groups led by David Kirn, MD and John Nemunaitis, MD, respectively. Many of us recall when it was hard to find enough presentations to fill out the Clinical Gene Therapy Symposium. This year, the Clinical Gene Therapy Symposium was a crowded event and excellent clinical results were presented in many of the oral abstract sessions as well.

A final highlight was the outstanding evening symposium presented by a team of five Patient Advocacy Groups. ASGT would like to welcome the ALS Association, Families of SMA, Fight SMA, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the SMA Foundation and we hope that our meeting will be the catalyst for productive collaborations between our members and the clinicians and patients your fine groups are representing.

None of this could have been accomplished without the hard work of the ASGT staff and committee members who worked long and hard before and during the meeting to ensure that the attendees could concentrate on the excellent presentations.

Our staff and committees are already hard at work planning for the 12th annual meeting of ASGT May 27-31, 2009 in San Diego, California. We are looking forward to a very dynamic meeting next year, so please save the dates!

Sincerely,

David M. Bodine, PhD
President, ASGT