Immune tolerance workshop

Sigtuna, a small town north of Stockholm, has been described to me as an idyllic historical town with beautiful wooden houses and a magnificent lake. And indeed, it feels like a little island where you can escape from your busy life, where you can find total silence, and where you can completely focus yourself. In conclusion, a perfect place for our first RTCure Immune Tolerance workshop.

The aim of this workshop was quadruple:

• to provide a forum for interactions and discussions on the theme of immune tolerance across a spectrum of immune mediated inflammatory diseases.

• to provide opportunities to identify new and complementary approaches to define and induce immune tolerance

• to provide a stimulating workshop environment for RTCure partners to share emerging data, with a focus on rheumatoid arthritis (RA)

• to generate, through discussion and debate, working definitions for operational tolerance

More than 120 speakers and attendees gathered in this small town to accomplish these goals. Most participants were partners of the RTCure consortium, but also nine well-known institutes were represented, namely Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK; VUmc, Netherlands; Institute Pasteur, France; Monash University, Australia; Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, UK; Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden; University of Oslo, Sweden; and Hôpital Necker-Enfants malades, France. All speakers gave inspiring presentations about their topic of expertise, and much time in the program was dedicated to discussions around the topic of Tolerance resulting in an exciting 3-day conference. We can honestly say that everyone went back to their busy work life loaded with ideas to tackle the hurdles of their research around RA in RTCure.