90 years for the Postgraduate Medical Journal

A Symposium is being organised by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine to mark the 90th Anniversary of its first official journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. The Symposium will be held at the Medical Society of London on on 1st October 2015.
Speakers on the day will comment on what medicine was like in the 1920s, current progress in their field, and what is in prospect over the next 90 years.
Other speakers will include FPM Fellow Professor Peter Barnes FRS, London, who will speak on advances in respiratory medicine, Professor Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge and Past-President of the Royal College of Physicians who will discuss opportunities to improve public health through a focus on health in the workplace, Professor Melanie Davies (Leicester) on progress in managing diabetes, vascular surgeon Professor Alison Halliday (Oxford) on carotid surgery to prevent stroke, FPM Fellow chemical biologist Andrew Marsh (Warwick) who will discuss advances in drug discovery, FPM Fellow cardiac surgeon Wade Dimitri (Coventry) who will discuss early development of heart surgery  Dr Paul Nunn (London), former Director of the WHO Tuberculosis Programme, on advances in managing tuberculosis, FPM Fellow Professor Munir Pirmohamed (Liverpool) who will discuss Progress in Personalised Medicine, Emeritus Professor Terence Ryan (Oxford) on Sir William Osler and Professor Karol Sikora (London) on cancer - a disease of our time.

The Postgraduate Medical Journal publishes topical reviews, commentaries and original papers on themes across the medical spectrum. It provides continuing professional development for all doctors, from those in training, to their teachers, and active clinicians, by publishing papers on a wide range of topics relevant to clinical practice.
Papers published in the PMJ describe current practice and new developments in all branches of medicine; describe relevance and impact of translational research on clinical practice; provide background relevant to examinations; and papers on medical education and medical education research.  The FPM is a British non-profit organisation founded in the autumn of 1919 as a merger of the Fellowship of Medicine and the Postgraduate Medical Association, with Sir William Osler as its first president. Its initial aims were the development of educational programmes in all branches of postgraduate medicine. 
The FPM organises clinical and research meetings and publishes two journals. The FPM has since 1925 published the international journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. In 2012 the Fellowship launched a new international journal, Health Policy and Technology, published on the Fellowship's behalf by Elsevier.

News of the 2013 EACPT Congress in Geneva

@HealthMed The EACPT's next biennial congress will be held in beautiful Geneva, 28th - 31st August in 2013 at the International Congress Centre of Geneva (CICG).

Registration will open 10^th November 2012.
Abstract submissions will also open 10^th November 2012 and will close 8^th February 2013.

To receive updates on the congress before registering, you can submit your email address to the congress organisers.
Over 900 participants are expected to attend including health professionals, scientists, policy makers, biotechnology and pharmaceutical professionals and others interested in basic and clinical pharmacology, pharmacotherapy, drug discovery and development, regulatory affairs and related areas.

Geneva by the lake

Key themes at the congress will range from bedside pharmacology for special patient groups to pharmacology & toxicology, and pharmacology and society. Specific topics will include sessions on communicating with the public, ethics, safe prescribing, clinical trial design and governance, and health policy; new biologicals, translational medicine and pharmacogenetics; advances in personalised diagnostics to improve the safety and effectiveness of medicines, updates on new biological approaches to ocular disease, therapeutics of cardiovascular, cancer and inflammatory disease, clinical trial design and regulation, and drug safety and toxicology. 

The European Association for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (EACPT) has its origins in a working party in the early 1980s under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO-Europe). The EACPT's next biennial congresses after Geneva 2013 are in Madrid 2015 and in Prague 2017. The EACPT also arranges summer schools, and other scientific and professional activities.

For more on the Congress, how to contact the organisers, and how to register to receive updates, see:

Congress Website: http://www.eacpt2013.org

Secretariat email: eacptreg@mci-group.com

Updates on cell signalling

@HealthMed After a 3 year gap, an excellent British Pharmacological Society International 4th Focused Meeting on Cell Signalling, again organised by the Leicester team and their colleagues. Around 190 international delegates from Monash, to Seattle and Tartu, enjoyed an outstanding speaker panel, followed by networking well into the evening.

Highlights ranged from recall in an after-dinner reminiscence by Humphrey Rang FRS, BPS President-elect, of his Oxford DPhil pioneering work on radio-ligand binding, to the latest technology applied to understanding the role of Beta-arrestin scaffold interactions in modulating receptor activation and contributing to biased ligand agonism.

Beta-arrestin interactions provide new concepts in cell-signalling, new understanding of individual variation in disease activity and severity, and new therapeutic targets, the landmark paper triggering this area published in Science in 1990 by Lefkowitz and colleagues.

Key themes of interest included:
Terry Kenakin, UNC Chapel Hill, on the impact of progress in developments on strategy for drug discovery
Katherina Lorenz, Wurzburg, on upregulation of endogenous RKIP as a strategy to reduce experimental congestive heart failure
Brigitte Kieffer, Illkirch, France, on imaging opiate receptors
Patrick Sexton, Monash, on allosteric modulation at muscarinic & GLP1 receptors

John Scott, Seattle, on kinase anchoring 

Manuela Zaccolo, Oxford, on cardiac cGMP-PDE-cAMP cross-talk and on cAMP control in cardiac muscleThomas Frimurer, Copenhagen, on binding pockets for drug discovery leads
Lester on nuclear GRK5-HDAC/Sin3A and the heart and on nuclear interactions

Drug dog-leg morphology interactions

Paul Sternweis, Texas: RGS-RhoGEFs & G proteins

Disordered & conserved elements coalescing

John Tesmer, Ann Arbor, on RNA aptamer targeting of GRKs

How to resolve undruggable targets

Drugs to improve deficits in passive avoidance

Fiona Marshall, Heptares Therapeutics, on StaRs - stabilised receptors - & new drug approaches to improve cognition

Christian Felder, Indianapolis, on allosterism & GPCR drug discovery

and much more ...

The next meeting is already planned - anyone interested in cell signalling: don't miss it!

Contact BPS re future meetings

The 'Magic of Medicine' at the Dana Centre

@HealthMed The Science Museum’s Dana Centre in South Kensington in London aims to provide updates for adults on contemporary science, technology and culture in an informative and innovative format. For those who can't make it in person the Centre makes its events available for interaction online or by smartphone.

The next event at the Dana Centre - on 16th February - is a sell-out session on the Magic of Medicines, organised jointly with the public engagement team at the British Pharmacological Society. Themes will range from drug discovery from Nature by the ancient Babylonians and Greeks such as that chewing meadowsweet or willow bark relieves pain, to new experimental approaches to drug discovery, latest advances in personalizing medicines, supported by companion diagnostics, to the need to maintain vigilant pharmacology and related expertise ready to combat new and unresolved disease challenges, in the face a declining pharmaceutical sector.

What's on at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre.

The Science Museum’s Dana Centre is a collaboration between the British Science Association, the European Dana Alliance for the Brain, and the Science Museum. It is part of the Wellcome Wolfson Building, which is supported by four principal donors - the Wellcome Trust, the Wolfson Foundation, The Dana Foundation and the Garfield Weston Foundation.

FPM to launch a new journal on Health Policy and Technology

@HealthMed Health Policy and Technology (HPT), the new official journal of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine (FPM), will be launched in March 2012 as a cross-disciplinary journal, which will focus on past, present and future health policy and the role of technology in clinical and non-clinical national and international health environments. HPT will be published by Elsevier, a major international publisher of scientific, technical and medical information

The FPM continues to publish its first international publication, the Postgraduate Medical Journal, launched in 1925. HPT provides a further excellent way for the FPM to continue to make important national and international contributions to development of policy and practice within medicine and related disciplines. The aim of the FPM in establishing this new international journal is to publish relevant, timely and accessible articles and commentaries to support policy-makers, health professionals, health technology providers, patient groups and academia interested in health policy and technology.

Topics covered  by HPT will include
- Health technology, including drug discovery, diagnostics, medicines, devices, therapeutic delivery and eHealth systems
- Cross-national comparisons on health policy using evidence-based approaches
- National studies on health policy to determine the outcomes of technology-driven initiatives
- Cross-border eHealth including health tourism
- The digital divide in mobility, access and affordability of healthcare
- Health technology assessment (HTA) methods and tools for evaluating the effectiveness of clinical and non-clinical health technologies
- Health and eHealth indicators and benchmarks (measure/metrics) for understanding the adoption and diffusion of health technologies
- Health and eHealth models and frameworks to support policy-makers and other stakeholders in decision-making
- Stakeholder engagement with health technologies (clinical and patient/citizen buy-in)
- Regulation and health economics

Professor Wendy Currie will lead the journal as its founding Editor-in-Chief. Her research, consultancy and publications focus on policy-making for large-scale information and communications technology (ICT) projects in health, financial services and government.

The first issue of Health Policy and Technology will focus on Electronic Health Records in the 21st Century, with papers discussing implementation targets for EHRs in healthcare organizations, cross-border policies for EHRs, financial and non-financial costs of introducing EHRs, clinical and patient engagement with EHRs, government policy for EHRs and country comparisons, security and governance practices in relation to EHRs, and the role of EHRs in campaigns to improve citizens' health and reduce health inequalities.

The first issue also includes a paper on the pioneering new Centre for Health Technology Assessment of Devices and Diagnostics within the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). There is also the first of a series of interviews with international leaders in the field of health policy and technology, beginning with Sir Michael Rawlins, Chairman of NICE.

The aim of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine (FPM) is to promote international calibre excellence in postgraduate medical education through its publications, clinical and scientific meetings, and other activities.  The FPM is a British medical charity that was founded at the end of World War I, when it pioneered development of post-graduate educational programmes in all branches of medicine.

Its foundation was the result of a merger between the Fellowship of Medicine and the Postgraduate Medical Association, with Sir William Osler the first president of the new organisation. The FPM is supported by Fellows with expertise in the practice of medicine, medical education and publishing, and research in medicine and related disciplines.

HPT website

FPM website

FPM contact email