9th Conference: Drug Abuse, Immunomodulation & AIDS

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a proposal to fund the 9th Conference of the Society on NeuroImmune Pharmacology (SNIP) to be held in Clearwater, Florida from October 2-6, 2002. The purpose of the meeting is to explore the role of drug abuse as a modulator of the neuroimmune axis. Symposia will flow from sessions on the basic etiology of drug-induced immune changes to clinical studies on neurodegeneration and neuroAIDS to epidemiological studies on AIDS progression in street addicts. Special symposia will be hosted by Adventis on mechanisms of neurodegeneration and by the PsychoNeuroImmunology Research Society (PNIRS) on the role of behavior and stress in modulating the neuroimmune axis. Since training of young scientists is a major goal of the conference, young investigator travel awards will be given to approximately a dozen graduate students and fellows who will be expected to present their own research at the meeting. To publicize the results of the conference, the chairs of each symposia will write a review of the topics covered in their session, which will then be combined with short papers from each presenter in the session. The six chapters will then be peer-reviewed and, upon acceptance, published as a volume of the Journal of Neuroimmunology. With the establishment of a nonprofit society to run the meeting, the conference committee structure has been expanded to allow for the greatest possibility of participation from the scientific community served. The bylaws of the society require regular turnover in the composition of the committees, which will allow greater opportunity to enforce the principles of gender and ethnic diversity in organizing the meeting. The society has established a web site, www.s-nip.org, which will be used to advertise the conference and to report on significant results presented at the meeting. The combination of the web site and the mailing lists accumulated from previous conferences should guarantee wide dissemination of the announcement of the Clearwater meeting and provide adequate publicity for the published results.