Dear Colleague,

This is an unique personal invitation to participate the 10th Bertine Koperberg Conference, being held in Noordwijk aan Zee, the Netherlands, from Thursday 16th till Saturday 18th of April on the theme Molecular Fingerprinting of auto-immune disease: from environment to cell.

Bertine Koperberg was the daughter of a Dutch jewish family that survived the second world war in exile. As a young woman she suffered from an unknown connective tissue disease and died at the age of 31 years. Her family decided to start a foundation to improve education and research on connective tissue diseases.

A board of directors was formed under the leadership of Bert Feltkamp, professor of autoimmunity in Amsterdam. That board decided to organize conferences in the field of connective tissue diseases, and so the Bertine Koperberg Conferences started.
The first conference was organized in May 1975, on the theme: “Significance of determination of anti-DNA and DNA / Anti DNA complexes”. These small sized conferences had two aims:

1. to function as a think tank: where should research in the field of connective tissue diseases move to?

2. to stimulate interaction between established researchers with young upcoming researchers in this field.

At that time this formula was unique and attracted key opinion leaders in the field. Under the guidance of Leo van de Putte themes discussed included: Why the joint? (1994), Apoptosis and autoimmunity (1999) and Citrillination and Autoimmune diseases (2005). In 2012 the Royal Dutch Federation of Medicine appointed a new board of the Bertine Koperberg Foundation, now consisting of Hans Bijlsma (chair, emeritus professor of rheumatology), Tom Huizinga (secretary and treasurer, professor of rheumatology, Leiden) and Alexander Leijdesdorff (surgeon, representative of the Koperberg family). In 2014 a new conference was organized, on B cells in autoimmune diseases (2014) and for 2020 the theme will be Molecular Fingerprinting of autoimmune disease.

Young scientists working in the field of translational immunology / rheumatology are very welcome to submit their application now to info@sickco.nl with a short CV and the abstract of the work aimed to present; this registration closes 15th of February. The conference is for invited guests only; we are aiming at a mix of young upcoming researchers in the field of auto-immunity and established researchers. Please see below the preliminary program. In addition to the speakers mentioned well known (“established”) researchers will be participating during the whole congress, such as Prof.dr. G. Krönke and Prof.dr. C.D. Buckley. We firmly believe that the interaction between both groups is crucial for this conference; therefor we would appreciate your stay throughout the whole conference, from Thursday 16th afternoon till Saturday 18th noon. The costs of the meeting, including all meals and lodging are limited to 100 Euro.

We hope you will be able to join us,

Hans Bijlsma, Tom Huizinga, Alexander Leijdesdorff and Sander Tas