First joint meeting of the German and Swiss Societies of Cell Biology

138 In an extremely lively and well-organized meeting, the university of Konstanz welcomed between 500 and 600 cell biologists during 3 days. The meeting had a very broad scientific basis, and not a specific focus on the use of cells for alternative methods. However, it provided a very good opportunity to learn more about high-throughput methods, high content imaging, signalling pathways and systems biology, which are becoming more and more prominent in basic cell biology, but also form the basis for the definition of toxicity pathways as defined by the 21st century vision of the national research council of the US. One of the sessions was particularly devoted to stem cells. It was opened by K.-H. Krause (Geneva) who demonstrated how such cells may be used for testing of drugs and how complicated 3-dimensional and electrically-active neural tissue can be generated from such cells. Alan Trounson (San Francisco) then introduced into the activities of the California stem cell consortium that is using 1 billion dollars/year to push stem cell technologies to applications in medicine and drug profiling. Ed Baetge (San Diego) gave the point of view of a small pharmaceutical company, that tries to develop stem cell based therapies for diabetes. the session was complemented by the Zeiss honorary lecture held by Rudi Jaenicke (Boston) who gave a deep insight into induced pluripotent cells (iPS) as opposed to embryonic stem cells (eSC). Interestingly, the speakers seemed to agree, that the potential of iPS cells as alternative to eSC looks good, but is too early to be judged yet. they were more sure, that toxicity testing and examination of disease mechanisms will be one of the first actual uses of cells differentiated from eSC or iPS. ml Conference Reports