The 11th congress was held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on 4–7 June 2008. The President for the meeting was John van den Anker. The Congress discussed both pharmacogenetics/pharmacogenomics and pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics in paediatric clinical pharmacology; drugs in pregnancy and innovative ways of drug delivery on the first day. On the second day topics covered included pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety; pain and sedation and pulmonary hypertension. On the final day, the new European Regulation was reviewed as well as the World Health Organization initiative on better medicines for children. It was a well-attended meeting with over 200 delegates.

The Lars Boreus prize was awarded to Suzanne McCarthy from London, UK for her presentation on “Mortality associated with ADHD drug treatment”. This prize includes free registration and accommodation at the next European Society for Developmental Perinatal and Paediatric Pharmacology congress which will be held in Chamonix, France in June 2009. The best poster presentation received the “Sanofi-Aventis Young Investigator Award” and this was awarded to Eva Schornick from Düsseldorf, Germany for her poster on “Novel taste-marked oral formulation of methylene blue against malaria for paediatric use”. The award consisted of a prize of 750 Euros.

There were 19 oral free communications (O), and 76 poster presentations (P). The abstracts for 21 of the invited lectures (L) are also shown below.

THE ROLE OF PHARMACOGENETICS/GENOMICS IN PAEDIATRIC CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY

G. Kearns. Department of Paediatrics, Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics, Kansas City, Missouri, USA; gkearns@cmh.edu

At present, human therapeutics squarely resides in a post-genome era. The age-old physiologic dictum of function and form now drives the translation of genomic data into a therapeutic paradigm where efforts to link genotype (for drug-metabolising enzymes, transporters, receptors) in a predictive relationship with phenotype (eg, activity of a drug-metabolising enzyme or transporter) abound through the application of pharmacogenomics. The “promise” for integrating this new biology into the …