15th Annual UKINETS Conference – an overview by Prof Nick Reed

The annual conference which amazingly marked the 15th anniversary was held at The Royal College Of Physicians in London on 4 December. The attendance exceeded over 200 reflecting the importance of this meeting as the UK’s main focus for neuroendocrine tumours. The programme organising committee produced another excellent and diverse program and it would be invidious to single out any individual presentations as they were all of high quality. The morning session focused on diagnostic monitoring and prognostic challenges and gave an overview of the current biomarkers, proposed changes in the WHO classification of neuroendocrine tumours and updates on both cross-sectional imaging and molecular imaging. The audience was left well up-to-date with new developments in all these topics. The second session on the morning focused on 5 topical clinical scenarios with an excellent overview by the speakers covering these topics.

The members attended the AGM during the lunch break and came back for an afternoon session which started with a lively debate over the role of resection of hepatic metastases in neuroendocrine tumours. The speakers gave convincing debates in favour and against the topic but recognised that the wider adoption of hepatic resection for liver metastases is now the standard of care. Following this was a session on translational science where the guest speaker was professor Aldo Scarpa from Italy who presented some of his recent data on the genomic landscape of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours. After the tea interval the 3 selected oral presentations all addressed important topics and although I suggested I would not highlight any presentations, the paper from Tracey  Genus and the NET Patient Foundation on the prevalence and incidence of neuroendocrine tumours in England reflects a lot of hard work that has been put together by the Public Health England team and senior members of the UKINETs community in the UK. This is ground breaking information within the UK and should help to inform future practices. The final session focused on nuclear medicine and the guest speaker was professor Richard Baum from Bad Berka giving his personal experience of the evolving landscape of nuclear medicine in neuroendocrine tumours.

The programme was diverse, scientific and educational and the programme organising committee should be congratulated on this selection of international and domestic speakers. The UK community should also be congratulated on producing some excellent oral communications and nearly 50 posters all of which were of high quality and worth looking at. It is remarkable to realise that this was the 15th annual conference and the progress that has been made over this time. We look forward to the 2018 conference which will be held on 10 December