We are very happy about the success of the recent 49th SIOP Congress in Washington D.C.  The meeting was very well received with a number of outstanding Keynote Talks, Symposia, and Meet-the-Expert sessions, along with more than two dozen free paper sessions.  Unfortunately the Poster and Poster Discussion Sessions were much less successful.  This has been a problem for the past few years and we are now considering ways to restructure the Annual Congress to make both of these sessions more successful.  More information about this will be released over the next few months.

The 50th 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.  One major highlight will be a Keynote Address by past SIOP president Giorgio Perilongo on the History of SIOP.  In what we believe is a first for a SIOP Congress, Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi from Tokyo and the 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will provide a Keynote Address on Autophagy.  Dr. Tasuku Honjo from Kyoto, an immunologist who identified Programmed Cell Death Protein-1 (PD-1), will provide another Keynote.

The abstract announcement will be released within the next month.  Importantly there will be an absolute deadline of April 10 for abstract submission.  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 includes the Chair and 3 members from pediatric oncology (Drs. Richard Grundy, Lillian Sung, and Marry van den Heuvel-Eibrink), along with the Chair of the Local Organizing Committee (Dr. Akira Nakagawara in 2017-18), and   representatives from Nursing (Corry Van den Hoed-Heerschop), Pediatric Surgery (IPSO, Dr. Joerg Fuchs), and Radiation Oncology (PROS, Dr. Christian Carre).  Given the importance of Psycho-oncology and the rapidly growing number of abstract submissions from this group, we have now added a member from the Pediatric Psycho-oncology group (PPO, Dr. Stephen Sands) to the Scientific Committee.

Stephen P. Hunger, MD

Chair, Scientific Committee