CYTO Asia 2017 meeting highlights

CYTO Asia 2017 was the first major cytometry meeting in South East Asia, with hopefully many more to follow. It was a joint meeting of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC), the Australasian Cytometry Society, and the Singaporean Society for Immunology. The CYTO Asia Program included elements for scientists working in all areas of cytometry and at all career stages. It began on Sunday, October 22 with 6th ASEAN Flow Cytometry Pre-Congress Workshop organized by Paul Hutchinson from the Singaporean Society for Immunology and Awtar Krishan and Zosia Maciorowski co-chairs of ISAC’s Live Education Taskforce. The workshop bought together clinical and research experts from around the world to teach participants the basic principles, applications, and latest techniques in flow cytometry. It incorporated many of the principals learned from our experience giving similar workshop in Africa, Europe, and India (1). The total number of participants broke all previous ISAC Workshop records and included 17 faculty, 60 full participants including eight students and another 22 participants who only attended the lectures, for a total of 100 attendees (Fig. 1). The Workshop consisted of both lectures and wet lab Modules where individuals had the chance to do some “hand on” flow cytometry. Topics ranged from introductory to advanced including lectures and labs on immunophenotyping, proliferation, RNA cytometry, cell signaling, and the infamous “Build Your Own Cytometer” taught by Bill Telford (NIH, Bethesda, MD) (2). Based on the number and feedback from attendees, and the huge interest within the Singapore scientific community, the Workshop was considered a great success and already there are plans for another ASEAN workshop to be held in Indonesia in 2019, as well as smaller workshops in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia within the next 12 months. The 3-day CYTO Asia 2017 scientific conference immediately followed the workshop on October 25 and covered both clinicaland research-based cytometry. It featured plenary, parallel, workshop, and poster sessions. It brought together over 450 attendees including 24 sponsors, 360 program registrants, including 26 student attendees, and 10 travel grant awardees (Figs. 2 and 3). Twenty-seven percent of the attendees were from Singapore, 26% of the attendees from Australia, and the remainder were from the USA (17%), China (10%), Indonesia (6%), South Korea (4%), and India (4%), and others from Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The Congress was divided into several tracks, one focusing on developments in Research, a second on Clinical Diagnosis and Applications, and a third aimed at Shared Research Laboratory (SRL) staff. Parts of each day were dedicated to talks of common interest to all participants, while at other times we divided into smaller groups in order to hear talks focused on a particular track. The conference opened with a talk by Alberto Orfao (University of Salamanca) about the future of minimal residual disease testing in leukemia and myeloma (3–5). He discussed how the newer high sensitivity flow cytometric assays have close to the same sensitivity as molecular approaches, are faster, and are applicable to a higher percentage of patients. Irene Oi-Lin Ng (The University of Hong Kong) gave the Keynote address on her hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) work (Fig. 4). HCC is the second commonest fatal cancer in China and Southeast Asia. She spoke on how her group using in vitro and in vivo models has