The Endocrine Society’s first all in-person annual conference since we were in New Orleans for ENDO 2019 has come and gone (as of this posting!) as thousands of endocrine professionals from around the world descended on the Windy City for four days of cutting-edge science as well as the opportunity to network and reconnect with friends and colleagues.
The June issue served as an unofficial show guide since it was primarily made up of highlights from various sessions featured at this year’s annual conference. In one of ENDO 2023’s Meet the Scientist sessions, attendees heard a unique perspective from Cherie L. Butts, PhD, medical director in the Therapeutics Development Unit at Biogen in Cambridge, Mass., where she leads clinical trial activities for neurodevelopmental disorders. In “A Call to Action,” she discusses her own career, which has flourished through academia, government, and industry, and emphasizes how scientists can work across disciplines to create new therapies for the greater good of improving human health conditions. Butts tells writer Kelly Horvath that this was not the career path she planned on, but it has allowed her to see the vast number of ways science is advanced and how she now wants to share that knowledge with everyone. “If we do not have individuals with a scientific background working in all parts of the healthcare ecosystem, we risk disinformation and misinformation permeating the general public and confusing them on basic principles, such as the importance of vaccines,” she says, adding “We saw this with COVID-19.” [Butts’ seminar, “My Career Path as a Biomedical Researcher in Industry” took place on Thursday June 15.]
We hear from another endocrine scientist who has made his mark in industry, R. Scott Struthers, PhD, who received the Endocrine Society’s 2023 John D. Baxter Prize for Entrepreneurship. When Struthers accepted the award at ENDO 2023, his career will have truly come full circle because Baxter was actually a friend and mentor of Struthers early in his career and knew him quite well. In “Full Circle,” Glenda Fauntleroy Show talks to Struthers about his friendship with Baxter and what receiving the award means to him at this point in his career, as well as his own life’s work seeking out therapies to cure endocrine diseases as well as how a career in industry is surprisingly similar to academia. [Struthers gave his John D. Baxter Prize for Entrepreneurship Lecture: Adventures Discovering Nonpeptide Oral Drugs Acting at Peptide Hormone Receptors on Thursday, June 15, on the ENDO Main Stage at McCormick Place during ENDO 2023.]
We are also featuring a prime example of the purpose of endocrine science when the therapies zoom past the idea stage, through the many laboratory experiments, and out into the world in the form of clinical trials. In “Such Great Heights,” senior editor Derek Bagley talks to Fernando Cassorla, MD, who is coming from Chile to Chicago to present research at ENDO 2023 that could potentially change the way pediatric hormone treatments are administered. In what has the potential for another breakthrough in endocrine science, Cassorla remains extremely cautiously optimistic on this “promising area of research,” stating that “these are lines of investigation that may pan out [or] they may not…” he says, adding “We’ll see whether the preliminary data is confirmed by longer term data, but up to now, it looks quite promising.” [Cassorla’s oral presentation, “Dose Responsiveness of LUM-201 as Measured by Acute GH Response and IGF-1 and Annualized Height Velocity (AHV) Measured at 6 Months in the Interim Analysis of the OraGrowtH212 Study in Idiopathic Pediatric Growth Hormone Deficiency (iPGHD),” took place on Saturday June 17 in the ENDO Expo Hall.]
For anyone nervous about their first big poster presentation at ENDO 2023, we are devoting the debut of a new column, “Early Career Corner,” to helpful hints to make your nerve-wracking presentation go a little bit smoother. Cheryl Alkon spoke to two first-time presenters for “Poster Preparation Pointers” who offer their own tips and advice for relieving some of the stress from presenting your research in a public forum for the first time. Early-career members Diana M. Dimayuga, MD, and PhD candidate Jewel Banik share what they learned when they presented their research last year at ENDO 2022 in Atlanta.
It was great seeing all of you in Chicago as we swarmed throughout McCormick Place once again.
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