It’s been a while since my last post but many exciting things have happened.
Last month, I went to TERMIS-EU (Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine) conference in Granada, Spain. The conference itself was huge! There were over 1000 delegates there. As I was there by myself it was certainly easy to get lost amongst the crowd. On the bright side there were a lot of events to meet other researchers, including a flamenco concert, tour of Granada, and large 3 course lunches. It was very interesting to see some of the really big names in the field. Anthony Atala gave an inspiring talk on the clinical successes that they were having with tissue engineered bladders and urethras (see here for a recent TED talk he gave). There was also a good debate at the end of the conference discussing two contrasting tissue engineering approaches — namely, farming, where the focus lies on the cells creating new tissues, and engineering, where tissues are created from scratch using material fabrication methods and cells are merely implanted to have a “remodelling” party. The answer lies someone in the middle, but as an engineer I naturally have leanings to the latter and it was fun to see it played out on stage by James Kirkpatrick and Robert Brown.
Granada is also a great place to visit. My brother happened to be travelling around Europe at the time so he came down and stayed with me towards the end of the conference and we went to see some of the sites/tapas bars. One tapas dish comes with every beer! I finished off the trip by sending a couple days in Malaga where I was due to catch my EasyJet flight. The guide books don’t necessarily paint a fully rosy picture of Malaga, so I was surprised to see that the centre of town had been very nicely redeveloped and was full of fun cafes that were open all the way to the early hours of the morning (and full of people!).