NeuroGASTRO 2017

From left to right: Georgiana Gîlcă, Roeland Buckinx, Elena Weibert, Eloísa Salvo-Romero, Anna Golubeva, Paulo Leonardo Pfitzinger. Image courtesy of Julian Meinhardt, Grasshopper Films (2017).

Hosted in collaboration with the APC Microbiome Institute and University College Cork, NeuroGASTRO (the annual meeting of the European Society of Neurogastroenterology & Motility) was held in Cork, Ireland in 2017. Standout plenary lectures by John Cryan, Jan Tack and Kirsteen Browning were held each day alongside a wide variety of topics covered in the main programme across the basic, translational and clinical sciences from enteric plasticity, to endocrine cells, to food allergies. Unsurprisingly, one topic that was discussed in every session was the gut microbiota in health and disease. But what stood out was the breadth of studies, including investigations into the role of the gut microbiota in ageing, gut physiology, the gut–brain axis (including behaviour) and gastrointestinal disease.

For the second time, Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology had the honour of supporting the nEUROgastro TANDEM Young Investigator meeting. Initiated in 2015, this meeting aims to bring together young investigators in the neurogastroenterology and motility community, and foster networks and long-lasting collaborations across basic and clinical research backgrounds.

This year, 10 pairs of young researchers (with either M.D. or Ph.D. backgrounds) were matched together based on their applications. There were 11 countries represented based on the origin of participants, and 14 of the 20 participants were women. Each pair were tasked with proposing a research project to present at the TANDEM meeting. Projects were then scored by all participants (including the TANDEM organizers) on various criteria, such as methods, feasibility and novelty.

The winning project, led by Paulo Leonardo Pfitzinger and Eloísa Salvo-Romero, focused on “Pancreatic cancer progression and mast cells”. The second-place project was “The melancholic fungi in the gut” from Georgiana Gîlcă and Anna Golubeva, with third place going to Roeland Buckinx and Elena Weibert for their project “Probing a gastrointestinal role of a new peptide”. The nEUROGastro TANDEM organizers were Ihsan Ekin Demir, Miriam Goebel-Stengel, Guillaume Gourcerol, Gemma Mazzuoli-Weber, Andreas Stengel and Mira Wouters, with Siobhain O'Mahony as local organizer.