Welcome address

For the last twenty years the AFM has been making steady progress towards its ultimate objective – curing neuromuscular diseases. And we’ve never been so close to this objective. Today, therapeutic pathways are opening up, some of which are being tried out on humans. Only twenty years – a time to develop new therapies for incurable diseases, a time to bring to birth a true scientific and medical revolution. On the timescale of research, that’s a lot of ground covered.
And yet … For those families who daily confront the urgency of neuromuscular disease, twenty years is far too long. The turning point – the treatments so long awaited – is well and truly under way. And it must succeed. Our role is to help researchers and clinicians to innovate, to progress faster in the development of therapies and the setting up of trials on humans for rare diseases. Our role is crucial, but we can do nothing without the scientific and medical community. We know it, and it’s thanks to your tenacity, your motivation and your commitment that we’ll win the battle.
Thus it’s with great pleasure that we welcome you to the Parc Chanot in Marseille from 26 to 30 May 2008 for this Third International Congress of Myology. There were nearly 1000 of you present at our last meeting in Nantes in 2005, and we hope there will be even more in Marseille – to exchange ideas, compare emerging therapies and share the first clinical results. This year’s congress will share its last day of exchanges with the Fifth International Congress of Rehabilitation which is also taking place in Marseille.
So, I’ll see you in Marseille next May for what I’m sure will be a fruitful as well as congenial congress, contributing to the success of this turning point for treatments.

Laurence Tiennot-Herment
President of the AFM

Message from Thomas Voit, President of Myology 2008

A warm welcome goes to all myologists, doctors, clinical scientists, researchers, industrial partners, patients and patient organisations to Marseille. On the shores of the Mediterranean Myology 2008 will provide an exceptional forum for meeting your friends and fellows, exchanging the latest news and shaping new avenues of collaboration!

Myology is not only an emerging science in its own right but is more and more becoming a motor of innovation in the field of Medicine. Addressing diseases which touch the two most inaccessible organs, the nervous system and the striated muscle, these disorders have long posed seemingly insurmountable barriers for curative therapeutic approaches. This circumstance in conjunction with the suffering imposed by many of these incapacitating diseases have spurned the innovative capacities, and we are seeing multiple therapeutic avenues developing such as pharmaco-, cell and gene therapies. Because these modes of therapy are addressing rare diseases in the field of myology, new challenges such as limited patient cohorts, mutation-based and not disease-based therapeutic principles, or new needs of preclinical therapeutic evaluation arise. This increasingly complex scenario is, we believe, faithfully reflected in the topics chosen by the Scientific Committee that range from fundamental science to the new modes of therapy and address the motor neuron, the heart and the skeletal muscle as prominent topics.

The Scientific Committee is particularly grateful for the readiness and enthusiasm of the invited keynote speakers who agreed to share their insights into the State of the Art and who will, no doubt, form the sterling backbone of this conference. Equally important is the clearly increasing implication of the industry who is actively conducting research in the field of myology and who will be present at different levels, among the invited speakers, at symposia, and in the scientific poster sessions.

An emerging and rapidly growing scientific field will not be viable unless it sustains its growth and knowledge by young researchers who are prepared to invest their talents and hard work. Because we acknowledge their importance and contribution we have decided to dedicate one afternoon of the congress to the Young Researchers and their selected contributions.

In sharing one day with the organizers and attendants of the International Congress of  Reeducation we acknowledge the increasing need for crosstalk between the two fields, in particular with a view to the emerging therapies and the implicit difficulty to reliably assess muscle function and performance across the spectrum of neuromuscular disorders.

The high turnout in contributions and quality we have received makes us confident that Myology 2008 will be an excellent international platform for fruitful discussions and scientific exchange. It will also be the occasion to meet your friends in the warm atmosphere of the Mediterranean world.

I wish you all a great time in Marseille.

Thomas Voit
Medical and scientific director of the Myology Institute (Paris, France)
President, Myology 2008