European Lipoprotein Club: Report of the 28th ELC Annual Conference, Tutzing, 12–15 September 2005

The 28th Meeting of the European Lipoprotein Club was held from 12 to 15 September at the Evangelische Akademie in Tutzing Germany and attended by some 120 participants from all over Europe and the United States. On Monday night, after the welcome by the ELC secretary, Marten Hofker, the state of the art lecture was presented by Tatsuhiko Kodama (Tokyo, Japan) entitled “Transcriptome analysis of vascular endothelial cell activation”. His main interest is the systems biology of the vascular wall and his presentation touched upon two elements that are at the core of this approach, namely RNA expression profiling and the generation of novel monoclonal antibodies to all human proteins to study protein expression. On Tuesday, the first session focused on the metabolic syndrome and was introduced by Allan Attie (Madison, USA). His presentation was entitled: “Mining the mouse genome for diabetes susceptibility genes”. The second session revolved around macrophages, inflammation and lipids and was introduced by Peter Tontonoz (Los Angeles, USA), with a presentation on the role of nuclear receptors in lipid metabolism and inflammation. On Wednesday, the third session focused on the interaction between lipids and the vessel wall. Two speakers were invited to present their work in this area. Jack Oram (Seattle, USA) presented work on the regulation of ABCA1 in atherogenic metabolic disorders and Eva Hurt-Camejo (Moelndal, Sweden) presented her work on the role of secretory phospholipases in atherosclerosis. The fourth session on genomics and proteomics was introduced by Werner Zolg (Penzberg, Germany) and he specifically discussed the application of proteomics strategies in diagnostics. The fifth session on genetics as well as the final “Varia” session on Thursday, consisted exclusively of speakers invited on the basis of their submitted abstracts.