Elsinore Series History

The Elsinore meetings on Infection Immunity

The Elsinore meetings on Infection Immunity were started over 30 years ago with two major purposes – to promote discussion between leading scientists working in infection and immunity and to try to bridge the gap between disciplines in those fields. As a result the Elsinore meetings have always had a slightly different character to most immunology meetings: they are relatively small (participants are limited to a maximum of 130) and both the program and the location are specifically chosen with the goal of promoting dialog between participants. The program brings together leading researchers in rapidly evolving areas of immunology in a quiet setting with no other distractions – and gives them time to not only present the state of the art in their field, but also talk informally with other interested researchers about where their field is going next. In short, the goal of these meetings is not to describe past research results, so much as to build collaborations for future research.

This approach has clearly been successful – year after year, the Elsinore meetings rapidly sell out of space for participants, and they attract speakers of an extremely high quality from around the world– and this despite the fact that the meetings have no fixed sponsor, and almost no advertising budget. That the Elsinore meetings have survived for more than 30 years entirely on the enthusiasm of the participants and on word of mouth in a scientific world with more meetings than ever, is a testament to the quality of this series of meetings. Perhaps an even more useful guide is the fact that multiple collaborations have developed among participants in these meetings, leading to such outcomes as the testing in human clinical trials of new vaccines, and the development of new adjuvants/vaccine delivery platforms.

The Elsinore meetings have evolved over the last three decades but the goals of the current meetings have not greatly changed (even if the topics discussed have!) and can now be summed up as:

To promote discussions between leading scientists in immunology and related fields
To foster collaboration between research groups who share overlapping areas of interest, but ordinarily might not meet
To foster collaboration between younger scientists and established research groups

To meet the first goal, the general program is drafted by the organizing committee, starting 2 years in advance of the meeting. Over several months of discussion, the organizing committee identifies topics of special interest in current immunology and leading scientists within those fields. These scientists are asked if they would be prepared to speak and to chair the session and by suggesting experts in their fields as invited speakers they help shape the exact content of the sessions.

The second goal – promoting collaboration among groups with different, but related interests in infection and immunity, who might otherwise not have an opportunity to discuss their work with each other – sprang from the observation that researchers often attend meetings that focus most narrowly on their area of special expertise. As a result, research in fields that could be complementary is not integrated as rapidly as it could be. Indeed, the very first Elsinore meeting was held to promote discussion between scientists working on cellular immunity and those working on humoral immunity. Since it is impossible to cover all of immunology in a single meeting, each Elsinore meeting chooses a specific theme – an area of immunology where rapid progress is being made on several fronts. For the 7th Elsinore meeting, in 2006, it was “Cellular Mechanisms in Host-Pathogen Interaction“. For 2009, the topic is “Prophylactic and Therapeutic intervention in Host-Pathogen Interaction” drawing on the growing interest in the immunology of chronic disease and how we can generate and modulate long-lasting immune responses. For this meeting, we have selected academic scientists doing cutting-edge work on persistent disease in fields as diverse as bacterial infections, T cell development and cancer and paired their presentations with those from scientists in academia and industry working in applied fields such as vaccine and adjuvant development for chronic illnesses.

The third goal – that of promoting interaction between the invited experts and younger investigators – is met via three methods. First, the Elsinore meetings have always been run with the goal of keeping registration costs as low as possible, so that institutes can send not just the lab head but also the most promising young investigators. This has been a notable feature of these meetings in the past. Secondly, the emphasis on open discussion does much to allow these scientists to develop their own collaborative network. Finally, this aspect is amplified by the fact that the Elsinore meetings are the only series of international meetings on basic immunology in Scandinavia. As a result, the Elsinore meetings allow junior Nordic scientists to interact with more senior colleagues from all over Europe, North America and the Asian/pacific region.

In short, the Elsinore meetings are very Danish: they are small, but carefully designed and attract international attention for their quality.