I had the great experience of attending the 2008 Stanford AAA Summit which was held at Stanford University on September 4-5. The purpose of the conference was to promote multidisciplinary collaboration for researching abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). Even though it was a small conference (about 125 people in attendance), many of the leading researchers of AAA from both academia and industry were in attendance and presented their work. The small-conference environment gave me the excellent opportunity to personally meet and discuss ideas with many of these experts during the poster sessions, meals, and other various activities.

I have been studying AAA for a few years now, and every talk seemed to be applicable to my work in one way or another. Experts in academia gave talks or presented posters that were about many aspects of the disease including possible causes and development, current clinical management, animal models, biomechanics, imaging, and potential new treatments under investigation. Experts from industry spoke on medical devices currently available to treat AAA, and strategies they are implementing to improve them.

One talk in particular that stood out to me, given by Dr. B. Timothy Baxter, was about potential drugs that could be used in the near future to treat AAA. As of now none are regularly used for AAA, but some are under clinical trials, others are being assessed in animal models, and others are under preliminary studies. I had recently read several journal articles put out from Dr. Baxter’s lab and it was great to hear him fit those studies together. This talk related very well to the poster I presented at the conference.

I presented a poster about the mechanics of the thrombus in AAA and a thrombus mimic we are developing which will be used to develop local drug delivery strategies to treat AAA. By presenting my own work, I was able to receive meaningful feedback from others, see how it fit in with other studies, and get ideas on how to overcome current challenges in my research.

As part of my visit to Stanford, I also briefly toured some of the Bioengineering labs there to see what facilities were available to them. These were very interesting and impressive to me.

I would like to thank the Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs for funding my travel to this conference through the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award. This truly was an amazing chance to learn about AAA and interact with experts in my field.