Letter from the Editor

Dear colleagues,

It is our privilege to offer you a small taster of some of the excellent abstracts presented orally and in poster form at the recent EULAR 2024 Congress.

This year, the venue was the Messe Wien Congress Center in Vienna. With a single long, well-aerated, and bright corridor joining the 4 major interlinked buildings on a single level, the centre was both easy to navigate and also pushed up the daily step count, thus contributing to excellent learning and lots of exercise–whether intentional or not.

The EULAR 2024 event had the extra spice of taking place during the European Football Championship in Germany, adding a layer of additional competitiveness amongst some of the delegates. Whilst some of the teams were playing out drab scoreless results in the football, the meeting content repeatedly served up stimulating and exciting data, with overflow rooms in use to facilitate the EULAR audience.

Herein, we provide some key abstracts and presentation summaries of the common inflammatory arthropathies, as well as connective tissue and other diseases, that we hope will be useful in painting a picture of current rheumatology practice, while also pointing to future directions for clinical practice. We hope that you enjoy the snippets that we have chosen and acknowledge the many worthy contributions that did not make our final selection.

Sincerely,

Prof. Dennis McGonagle

 

Biography

Dennis McGonagle, FRCPI, PhD, is an Academic Rheumatologist at the University of Leeds and section head of Experimental Rheumatology. He graduated in Medicine from the University College Dublin in 1990 and undertook postgraduate training in Dublin and Leeds where he completed his PhD. He has developed the modern enthesitis model for spondyloarthropathies and psoriatic arthritis including the cytokine mediated enthesis originating theory of disease (Lancet 1998). He also described the synovioentheseal complex, nail anchorage to the skeleton, developed an integrated biomechanical and immunology model for PsA, and a mechanistic disease classification of immune diseases (PLoS Med 2006). His group also discovered synovial fluid mesenchymal stem cells, which is being researched towards osteoarthritis therapy development. Prof. McGonagle has also served on the EULAR scientific committee and is a member of the Editorial Board of ARD, and has won several international awards including the Carol Nachman Prize in 2023.

 

Conflict of Interest

Prof. McGonagle has undertaken research and/or educational programme activities with Pfizer, MSD, AbbVie, BMS, UCB, Novartis, Lilly, Celgene, Moonlake, and J&J.



Posted on 29 July 202413 January 2025