Janet Pope, MD: CCR West Day One Highlights

The first day of the Clinical Congress of Rheumatology (CCR) West 2019 annual meeting in San Diego brought discussions of immunology, case reports, and guidelines to the forefront.

Beginning with a poster session in the morning, the first day of the 5-day conference kicked off with several fellows and trainees receiving awards for their presentations before transitioning to seminars on immunology and IL-6. 



Janet Pope, MD, professor of rheumatology at the University of Toronto and division head in Rheumatology at St. Joseph's Health Centre, was a judge of the poster session and also led a symposium on the immunology of systemic lupus erythematosus and how its understanding has contributed to the development of new therapies.

After sessions wrapped up at CCR West, Pope took the time to sit down with MD Magazine® to discuss what her biggest takeaways and highlights were from the first day of the conference.





MD Mag: What were your biggest takeaways from day one of CCR WEST?

Pope: So this is pretty neat having CCR West because it's a whole new batch of trainees here. So I think the highlights from day one to me were the breadth and depth of the posters. There were 45 or so, poster presentations—I think 55 trainees here.

So, that, in and of itself, is a highlight that shows a lot of our future and rheumatology are the trainees here who are interested, who will become rheumatologist some of them. So, that's pretty neat. But within the posters are a lot of case reports and rare things and it humbles me as a long-seasoned clinician, that there's lots of stuff I still don't know and the funny thing is the commonality of we didn't know what to do, but we all would have guessed kind of the same treatments that the patients got. So, that was kind of neat.