With 6 months till our Annual Meeting in Athens this would be a great time to encourage abstract submissions and we remain dedicated to providing support for our trainees. The organizers invited speakers program has come along nicely – but abstracts remain an important source of the speakers chosen. In other words – submit your abstracts before the May 15th deadline. It is also our awards season – and this year we had an exceptional slate of candidates for our Senior & Mid-Career awards (Judy Lieberman, Daniel Cua,  Dusan Bogunovic, Jacob Yount, Daniela Novick and Brendan Jenkins), while we have had a record number of nominees for the junior awards (to be announced soon). Important opportunity to acknowledge those who took the time to nominate these candidates and the work of our awards committee in assessing these amazing cytokine biologists.

A long-term goal of the society was to strengthen opportunities for our members to organize scientific sessions that revolve around cytokine biology. Upcoming ICIS sponsored sessions at AAI in May “Understanding and Modulating Cytokine Activity through Structural Knowledge”, “Cytokines in Barrier Immunity FOCIS” in June, “Novel Immuno-Biology at Single cell resolution”, at the end of November at IUIS in Cape Town, chair: Luke O’Neill @laoneill111, confirmed speakers so far: Gordon A. Awandare West African Center for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens & Kondwani Jambo, Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme , and the BSI Belfast in December.

As our members look forward to 2024 consider the options for getting support for lone day local meetings or sessions associated with other immunological societies.

Several committee events ongoing – work on DEI, career session with an emphasis on industry perspectives and ongoing discussions about how to better serve our member interests with the journals Cytokine and the Journal of Interferon and Cytokine Research.

Upcoming elections – look out for the ballots and be ready to help select your society leadership!

Endowments advance the mission of the International Cytokine & Interferon Society – I’d like to take this opportunity to acknowledge two endowed gifts that have been generously donated to the ICIS as follows: 

Annual memorial lecture honoring Professor Jürg Tschopp: thanks to a generous anonymous donation and matching ICIS funds and endowment has been set up to fund an annual memorial lecture honoring Professor Jürg Tschopp whose discoveries in the area of inflammasomes and cell death advanced fundamental understanding of innate and adaptive immunity bringing new therapies to patients suffering from debilitating inflammatory diseases.

Each year, beginning last year at the Hawaii meeting, the Jürg Tschopp Memorial Lecture will be a highlight of the Cytokines Annual Meetings where Dr. Tschopp’s ability to take fundamental discoveries at the bench into the clinic fits perfectly with the mission of the Society annual meeting which is the world’s most important conference on basic, translational and clinical research related to cytokine biology.

The ICIS-BioLegend William E. Paul Award for Excellence in Cytokine Research has been funded by a generous donation from BioLegend which will keep the award, which they initially funded in 2016, going indefinitely. BioLegend has chosen to dedicate this award to William E. Paul, M.D., who died on September 18, 2015 at age 79. Dr. Paul’s extraordinary contributions to the field of cytokine research are best summarized by this paper published in the Journal of Immunology on December 15, 2015. The ICIS-BioLegend William E. Paul Award is bestowed upon a leading biomedical research scientist who has made outstanding contributions to cytokine research, either in a basic or applied field as demonstrated by publications, oral presentations and consistent scientific advancements in cytokine biology throughout their career, through the generosity of BioLegend.

I hope to see many of you in Athens this October!