Dear Colleagues:

It is hard for me to believe it is only a little over a month until we all come together again in-person for the ASBMR 2022 Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, USA! This month I want to provide you some details regarding our exciting Annual Meeting program.  First, a huge thank you to the Annual Meeting Program Committee—Chair Raj Thakker, M.D., FRS and Co-Chairs Christa Maes, Ph.D. (Basic), Marc Wein, M.D., Ph.D. (Translational) and Emily Stein, M.D. (Clinical)—as well as the dozens of volunteers that served as abstract reviewers. Our Society remains a vibrant one in large part to the dedicated work of members like you!

I am thrilled for us to come together in-person in Austin. For many of you this will be your first in-person ASBMR Annual Meeting experience since 2019; and there will be plenty of innovative science to take in with over 100 oral presentations and nearly 1,000 poster presentations presented over the course of four days. We are also excited to offer 26 meet-the-professor sessions and a virtual poster session that will give select remote presenters the opportunity to interact live with in-person attendees. 

The Program Committee has also put together a wonderful invited-speaker program. Dr. Brian K. Kobilka, MD is this year’s Gerald D. Aurbach Lecturer. Dr. Kobilka is the recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discoveries that revealed the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. Dr. Pamela Robey, PhD will give this year’s Louis V. Avioli Lecture on “The Many Faces of Skeletal Stem Cells”. Dr. Lynda Bonewald, PhD and Dr. Juliet Compston, MD will again provide the “Highlights of the ASBMR 2022 Annual Meeting”. Back by popular demand, Dr. Henry Kronenberg, MD and Dr. Dolores Shoback, MD will again deliver the “Annual Review of Science”. The ASBMR/ECTS Clinical Debate will be a stimulating one on whether “Anabolic Agents Should be First Line Therapy for Patients with Severe Osteoporosis”.

Last year, ASBMR formed a task force to examine the inclusion of race and/or ethnicity in the calculation of an individual’s absolute fracture risk and its effect on subsequent osteoporosis management. The ASBMR Task Force on Clinical Algorithms for Fracture Risk is charged with reviewing the latest evidence to determine if the current approaches on adjusting absolute fracture risk based on race and/or ethnicity are valid. The task force will provide its important preliminary findings in Austin.

I also want to take this opportunity to remind you of the exciting pre-meeting symposium that is occurring in Austin on Thursday, September 8, 2022, one day prior to the start of the Annual Meeting. “Rare Diseases: From Molecules and Mechanisms to Therapeutics” aims to promote interaction between basic, translational and clinical researchers in the rare bone disease field. I personal thank the organizers Anna Teti, PhD, Frank Rauch, MD and Erik Imel, MD for putting together an excellent pre-meeting program.

Abstracts will be available via the Annual Meeting Itinerary Builder later this month to current members and registered Annual Meeting attendees. If you have not yet registered or booked your hotel for Austin – I encourage you to do so by visiting the ASBMR website. Don’t miss out on the ASBMR room block that is available until next Wednesday, August 10!

We also listened to your feedback and made numerous improvements to the Annual Meeting mobile app, including: 

• Displaying full abstract text, authors, presentation IDs and images in the app.
• Linking poster titles to the e-poster library.
• Enhancing the search function to better allow attendees to search author name and key words.
• Adding a room map and schedule at a glance to the main app menu.

There is something for everyone in our exciting Annual Meeting program.

I look forward to welcoming you to Austin next month!

Sincerely,

Peter R Ebeling

President, ASBMR