REGENERATION

19 - 21 November 2003 - Barossa Valley - South Australia

The inaugural "Science Amongst the Vines" meeting was held November 19-21, 2003 at the Novotel Resort in the heart of one of Australia's premier wine producing areas, the Barossa Valley. Co-chaired by Mathew Vadas and Angel Lopez, these meetings are designed to draw together leading thinkers to discuss topics and ideas of emerging interest. This meeting focussed on "regeneration" and was organized to encourage vigorous debate within a relaxed and intimate atmosphere. Sessions covered such diverse topics as cell death and survival, the application of stem cells in regeneration and animal models of tissue regeneration. A stellar lineup of both international and national speakers highlighted both current paradigms as well as the outstanding questions in these fields.

The first session, entitled "signals deciding life and death" kicked off with 3 speakers, Jerry Adams Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research), Sharad Kumar (Hanson Institute) and Michael Karin (University of California) who have each made landmark discoveries in understanding how cell survival is regulated. These talks illustrated how individual cells "make decisions" as to whether to survive or die (apoptosis) based on the activity of key signalling proteins (e.g. bcl-2, caspases, NF-kappaB) within the cell. Each of these speakers presented a large body of work that provided insights into the regulation of these decisions at a molecular level and their impact on determining whether tissues regenerate or degenerate.

The second session covered one of the most important cell types involved in the regenerative process; the stem cell. Stem cells are pluripotent; that is they have the potential to grow and become cells of a variety of lineages such as neural (brain) cells, muscle cells or blood cells. Thus stem cells could be used as a source of specific cell types to promote regeneration in different tissues and diseases. Perry Bartlett (University of Queensland) spoke about work in his laboratory that was the first to recently describe the isolation of neural stem cells. Understanding how these cells can be isolated and grown may have clinical implications for the treatment of brain injury or pathologies such as Parkinson's disease. Peter Rathjen (University of Adelaide) spoke on how embryonic stem cells can be controlled to differentiate into different cell types and also presented tantalising data on how these cells may be harnessed to treat brain and muscle diseases.

The last two sessions covered animal models for the study of regeneration. The immune system plays a critical role in the axis between regeneration and degeneration. Richard Flavell (Yale University) gave a wonderful tour de force of unpublished data (which has since been published in the prestigious journals, Cell and Science) showing how the immune system cleans up dead cells and allows regeneration. Nadia Rosenthal (Director of the EMBL, Rome) gave us insights into how muscle regeneration could be improved by growth factors and showed us the remarkable potential of some of these factors in making what has been popularly dubbed the "Schwarzenegger Mouse". Didier Stainier (University of California) and Peter Currie (Victor Chang Institute) elegantly illustrated how zebrafish can be used to investigate complex biological problems using simple genetic approaches.

Intermingled with these sessions were a number of opportunities for attendees to talk in more informal surroundings with organized winery tours and dinner in the wine cellars of Saltrams. One of the highlights of these breakout sessions was the impromptu sing-a-long led by Richard Flavell on guitar whose Punk interpretation of PCR cloning (entitled "DN-AYE") generated much discussion. Importantly, this meeting managed to bring together scientists at the forefront of diverse fields to tackle the important questions of how regeneration is regulated and what goes wrong with these processes in degenerative diseases. The combination of the relaxed environment conducive to free discussion and the high quality of science that allowed the examination of regeneration in health and disease from many different angles proved to be a great success.