In November 2021, the Society for Endocrinology’s annual meeting (SfE BES 2021) was held in Edinburgh, UK. This was a very special meeting for two reasons: it celebrated 75 years of the Society of Endocrinology and it was the first large in-person meeting since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic for many attendees. Over 900 delegates (wearing masks unless presenting) gathered at the venue to view a mixture of live and recorded presentations, and to experience in-person networking opportunities.

The meeting opened with Inês Cebola (Imperial College London, UK) outlining some exciting new developments in basic endocrinology research, such as adipose tissue being mapped with spatial transcriptomics and single-cell chromatin accessibility being assessed in pancreatic islets. Maralyn Druce (Barts Health NHS Trust, UK) also highlighted clinical developments; for example, new therapies for hot flushes in menopause and the wider use of GLP1 receptor agonists for adults without type 2 diabetes mellitus, but with overweight or obesity.

After this, Jeffery Friedman (Rockefeller University, USA) gave the SfE BES 75th Anniversary Lecture, discussing the discovery of leptin and its roles in appetite and obesity. Friedman outlined the neurocircuits that are regulated by leptin and how leptin resistance might be targeted in obesity. Following this theme, Sadaf Farooqi (MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, UK) discussed the biology of weight regulation in her excellent Society for Endocrinology Dale Medal Lecture. Farooqi discussed the heritability of obesity and the relevance of melanocortin 4 receptor signalling, before considering how hypothalamic circuits might integrate appetite with other behaviours.

On the second day, Wiebke Arlt (University of Birmingham, UK) delivered an illuminating talk on advances in diagnostics for adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC), using multi-omics technologies. Arlt discussed the validation of a new triple test for ACC, which incorporates tumour size, imaging characteristics and the steroid metabolome profile. Also on the adrenal theme, Alessandro Prete (University of Birmingham, UK) gave the clinical Early Career Prize Lecture, on benign adrenocortical tumours, which are an understudied contributor to cardiometabolic health.

Two plenary talks on the final day covered potential therapies for patients with iatrogenic Cushing syndrome, caused by exogenous glucocorticoid treatment. First, Márta Korbonits (St Bartholomew’s Hospital, UK) considered the use of metformin to reduce symptom severity in patients without diabetes mellitus on glucocorticoids. Jeremy Tomlinson (University of Oxford, UK) then discussed targeting glucocorticoid metabolism upstream of the glucocorticoid receptor. The approach has shown promise in preclinical and early human investigations.

I very much enjoyed SfE BES 2021 and I look forward to the conference in 2022.