During the two days of 12th and 13th of September we held our meetings in Vienna.
First of all, explaining why is a spring Symposium held in September. We decided this because in May, the original data, the international calendars were full with all kinds of meetings about MPN, therefore we decided not to fill it up with an additional meeting, but to postpone it till September.
Content guide
A Collective Vision: Charting the Future Together
The basic purpose of the meeting was to bring together Patients, Physicians and Pharma (3P’s) representatives together in order to be able to talk about our mutual worries and ideas for today and the future.
I consider, based on what I saw and heard and the feedback I got after the meeting, that this point has been achieved in full and I think this is a milestone in our MPN History.
Thanks to everybody for being present or on streaming or watching on livestream. We appreciate your support very much.
Day 1: Patient-Centric Approach, Shaping Tomorrow's MPN Landscape
We started with fairly general items, what does quality of life mean for an MPN patient, how does a physician look at this question and the same question for a pharma representative.
We then talked about the toxicity of the new and old treatments with lots of clarifying statements.
In the afternoon we had our MPN Award session. Prof. Heinz Gisslinger, Prof Martin Ellis,
Dr. Hugh Rienhoff, MPN Voice UK and Protagonist received their Awards. This cannot be explained by words, you have to look at it. Video is coming within short.
Day 2: Expert Dialogues, Bridging Knowledge Gaps and Easing Concerns
Next day, we had Prof. Haifa Al-Ali with us all day, which made the discussion even more lifely. She explained many of the questions from the patients, a great job from her, same as the day before from Prof. Martin Ellis.
We talked about PV, ET and MF in the morning with the help of Prof. Jean Jacques Kiladjan and Prof. Veronika Buxhofer-Ausch, Prof Serge Verstovsek joined us in the afternoon.
This was a great team all day and they were very busy clearing many doubts from our patients.
Conclusions and Future Prospects
We were at a beautiful place, the Billrothhaus, a very historical building, remember this well known Physician Dr. Billroth. We were sitting in the middle of a huge library giving us inspiration for our talks.
Unfortunately, the high temperatures in Viena and the old building of the Billrothhaus left difficult conditions in the room and we had to shorten our pm session a little, but kept on talking while taking a Wienerkaffee.
For me this meeting has been a historical event and it gave a lot of energy to the way we are going, together with all of you and hopefully more patients and specialists will join.