LUMINEX has announced the first details of its 2012 Planet xMap symposium, the tenth in the series. Dr Jean William Pape, director and founder of the Gheskio Centres in Haiti, will deliver a keynote presentation at the event, held 10-11 October 2012 at Monaco.
Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and suffers the highest incidence of HIV. Clinicians there noticed in the early 1980s a higher than usual number of patients dying of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a cancer caused by the HHV8 human herpes virus and now known as an ‘Aids defining illness’.
In 1982 Dr Pape founded the Gheskio Centres, named for the acronym Groupe Haïtien d’Etude du Sarcome de Kaposi et des Infections Opportunistes (Haitian Group for the Study of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections). This became the first to document the then-new phenomenon of HIV in a developing country, in a 1983 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Pape is a professor of medicine at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, USA, and will deliver a keynote presentation at xMap 2012.
The full scientific programme over the two days of the symposium will, as in previous years, include plenary sessions on human genetics, immunology monitoring, detection of pathogens, and both genomic and proteomic research.
The Planet xMap scientific committee, headed by Francois Topin, is currently accepting submissions and will select papers and posters based on the importance of their content, originality and focus, timeliness of the topic, author expertise, and potential for discussion. Proposals must be submitted before 1 June 2012.
Luminex has also announced the first three commercial sponsors of the event: Merck Millipore, Moss, and Europa Bioproducts.
Planet xMap 2012 is to be held at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco.