The 50^th SIOP Congress will take place in Kyoto, Japan November 16-19, 2018.  This is sure to be one of the most important and successful SIOP Congresses ever conducted.  This Congress will include the 3^rd SIOP-St. Baldrick’s Foundation Seminar, which will focus on Cancer Predisposition.  Dr. Garrett Brodeur is the convener of this symposium and other speakers will be Drs. David Malkin, Steven Joffe, and Raoul Hennekam.  A major highlight of the Congress will be a Keynote Address on Autophagy by Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi from Tokyo, who was the 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  Scientific Committee member Marry van den Heuvel-Eibrink will lead a Meet the Expert Session entitled How to set up a survivorship clinic.

The deadline for abstract submissions is April 10.  In the recent past, SIOP has extended the deadline for a week.  The Scientific Committee believes that this extension, known to some but not many others, was unfair and hence will not have a planned deadline extension this year.

The Scientific Committee has taken a careful looking at the Congress schedule.  We have been unhappy with the organization of Poster Sessions in recent years, and we have also received significant negative feedback about the poster sessions from meeting attendees.  To address this, we have reformatted the Congress schedule.  Day #3 (Monday November 19) will now be a full day, ending about 5 PM.  There will be two 90-minute poster sessions on the evenings of Saturday November 17 and Sunday November 19, with half of the posters presented each day.  Beer, soft drinks, and light snacks will be provided to encourage attendance and conversations.  These sessions will use poster boards, with presenters also encouraged to submit their posters electronically so that they will be available on the SIOP Congress app and also able to be posted on the SIOP website after the meeting.  The format of poster discussion sessions will also be new this year.  There will be 6 parallel poster discussion sessions held in meeting rooms on the afternoon of Monday November 19.  A discussant will discuss 6-8 individual posters using slides, with time for feedback between the discussant, the abstract authors, and the audience.  We hope that all of these changes will make the SIOP 2018 Congress the best one yet!

Stephen P. Hunger, MD

Chair, Scientific Committee