The 27th European conference on biomaterials: facts and figures

The Polish Society for Biomaterials (PSB) and AGH University of Science and Technology (AGH) hosted the 27th Conference of the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB). The conference was held in Kraków, Poland from 30th August to 3rd September 2015 at the brand new ICE Congress Center. More than 966 participants from 44 countries attended the ESB 2015 conference. Figure 1 shows the number of attendees from different countries: the highest number of participants came from Poland, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands. The participants were mostly European, although there were also a considerable number of attendees from overseas countries such as Japan, US, Korea, Australia, China, Mexico and many others. The scientific program included 58 Sessions and was comprised of 277 oral presentations, 38 rapid fire and 534 poster presentations (Fig. 2). The program contained eight plenary lectures given by: Prof. Joachim Kohn of the New Jersey Center of Biomaterials, US; Prof. Maria Siemionow of University of Illinois at Chicago, US; Prof. C. James Kirkpatrick of University Medical Center Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany; Prof. Geoff Richards of AO Research Institute Davos, Switzerland; Prof Michael V. Sefton of University of Toronto, Canada; Prof. Kazunori Kataoka of University of Tokyo, Japan; Prof. Małgorzata Lewandowska-Szumieł of Medical University of Warsaw, Poland and Prof. Abhay Pandit of National University of Ireland. There were also 16 keynote lectures presented by renowned international experts and 2 lectures by award winners: the International Award for Prof. Nicholas A. Peppas and the Jean Leray Award for Dr. Joachim M. Oliveira. In addition we were pleased to host special sessions, e.g. the Young Scientist Forum, the Special Fellows Session, the Translational Research Symposium and Science for Industry, during which 29 additional presentations were given. During ESB 2015 more than 24 companies were present in the exhibition area. The main motto of the 27th ESB was ‘‘Balancing the needs for basic research and translation in a time of limited resources’’. To address this issue, the conference program was designed to cover a variety of topics,