Wellcome Letter


Dear Guests of the 2010 Asilomar Conference.

After six years we welcome you back to Europe for the 18th International Conference for Brain Tumor Research and Therapy. To pay tribute to the founder's idea of a somewhat secluded retreat where we can share our recent findings and ideas for future progress, we chose the old spa of Travemünde, although we would have been proud to have the conference in Hamburg itself. But the city of Hamburg is just too attractive and has so much to offer that it would have been too much of a distraction. Being here we will take the opportunity to visit one of the other major Hanse Cities, Lübeck, - the hometown of Thomas Mann and the place where marzipan was created. Being high up in the North we should be able to enjoy long daylight evenings.

The program is tight, thanks to the very positive response by everybody and there is a number of regulars to this conference who are very sad that other personal commitments kept them from attending this time around. In the tradition that everybody should present we have a program which leaves not much time in the sessions for discussion but ample free time to interact afterwards. For the first time we mixed pediatric and adult neuro-oncology because the fields can rather mutually influence each other than that they are separate.

We hope that you will enjoy the truly international atmosphere of the conference and the location which is one of the major gateways to Scandinavia. We also hope that with the contribution of everybody, we will be able to prove that the Asilomar Conference with its unique format is a vital forum for translational neuro-oncology and will continue to be so in the future when it will move next again to the Americas in two years and then to Asia in four years.

We wish you a pleasant stay in Northern Germany and foremost safe travels,

Manfred Westphal