Apoptosis World 2008—From Mechanisms to Applications: Kirchberg, Luxembourg, 23–26 January 2008.

It is not yet time to move to a more exciting and fertile field of research! For those who attended the ‘Apoptosis World 2008—From Mechanisms to Applications’ meeting at the European Congress Center in Kirchberg, in the neighbourhood of Luxembourg, this is the reassuring message they can bring home. There is still a lot of work to be done for researchers interested in cell death! A number of ‘black holes’ in the basic knowledge of molecular mechanisms governing apoptosis and sister forms of cell death, such as autophagy and anoikis, still remain, as numerous speakers highlighted during their talks. Among these, insufficient understanding of ‘who controls whom’ in the network of signalling that positively and negatively regulate cell death or inadequate knowledge of the evolutionary meaning of proteins implicated in the apoptosis and autophagy main pathways. Are these proteins just moonlighters of death whose death-unrelated daily function allowed them to be phylogenetically conserved, as suggested during the keynote session and by various data presented during the meeting? Actually, this could explain why caspase 8 plays a role in the differentiation of haematopoietic cells without killing them or why tumour cells maintain a potential apoptotic machinery, as described during the meeting. Moreover, there is at least another good reason why this is not a time to shrink from apoptosis. The past decade was marked by terrific progress in deciphering the main pathways involved in apoptosis, but frustrating attempts to transfer basic knowledge into real benefits for human health. It seems that we are now entering in a new phase where translational research on apoptosis will be more remunerative. This was the ‘air people breathed’ while listening, for example, to the recent progress in preclinical studies on the Bcl-2 antagonist ABT-737 in the superb ‘Hemicycle Room’, where all the talks have taken place, or browsing among the posters in the lobby and the corridors of the European Congress Center.

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