30 WORLD GASTROENTEROLOGY NEWS MAY 2016 Editorial | Expert Point of View | Gastro 2016: EGHS-WGO | WDHD News | WGO & WGOF News | WGO Global Guidelines | Calendar of Events chemotherapeutic options in CRC. Liver disease featured in several sessions. New Zealand ranks as one of the most obese countries in the world. The interest in nonalcoholic steato-hepatitis (NASH) was therefore not surprising and potential pathogno-monic mechanisms, diagnostic inter-ventions, and treatment options were discussed by Drs. Nick Crook, David Orr, and Dominic Ray-Chaudhuri. The Trans Tasman Lecture was eloquently delivered by Prof. Leong on the “Ethnic Differences in Access to Treatment for GI Disorders in Australasia.” He highlighted concerns regarding availability of specialist services and cutting edge treatment options, a concern highly relevant for New Zealand with a wide-spread rural population. A scientific highlight for every meeting are the free papers demon-strating the diversity and excellence of gastroenterological research in New Zealand. The spectrum ranged from basic scientific projects employ-ing colonic enteroids to study the fundamentals of IBD (Ely Rodrigues and Safina Gadeock, University of Otago), the use of animal models for the development of therapeutic techniques to modulate gastric electri-cal activity (Tim Angeli, University of Auckland), and work on gastrointes-tinal chemosensing (Edward Walker, The NZ Institute for Plant and Food Research), to clinically highly relevant projects. The clinical topics included, for example, the epidemiology of IBD in Canterbury (Heidi Su, Canterbury Digestive Health Board), outcome of the treatment of GT1 HCV infection with standard therapy and Bocepre-vir (Sylvia Wu, Waitemata Digestive Health Board) pre- and anti-biotic treatment of Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) (Riaz Shaik, Auckland Digestive Health Board), prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) (Lily Wu, Auckland), and much more. As usual the judging panel, consisting of our international guests and national experts, had a difficult time declaring a winner for the prestigious Best Luminal and Best Liver Presentation Award. The successful presenters were: Dr. Tim Angeli (NZSG Best Luminal Paper/ Poster) for his presentation on “Gas-tric ablation as a novel therapeutic op-tion for modulating gastric electrical activity” and Lily Wu (AbbVie Best Hepatology Paper/Poster) on “Prog-nostic factors of survival and recur-rence of hepatocellular carcinoma treated with curative intent.” A further social highlight of the meeting was the 4th Annual Great Guts Fun Run with great early morn-ing participation. The proceeds of this initiative were gratefully received by Crohn’s and Colitis New Zealand. The conference dinner, this year themed “Star Trek to Star Wars,” was a huge success. Following the presentation of the prizes, including the major sci-entific awards (including the NZSG Janssen Research Fellowship for An-drew McCombie, Russell Walmsley, Murray Barclay, and Michael Schultz: “A multicentre pilot study of use of smartphone-based health applications IBDSmart & IBDoc in the care of IBD patients in NZ” and the NZSG AbbVie Research Grant for Ely Ro-drigues, A. Grant Butt, and Michael Schultz: “How does Crohn’s Disease modify the response of the intestinal epithelium to commensal bacteria?”), numerous Star Troopers, Princess Leias, Chewbaccas, and Jedi Knights danced the night away under the watchful eyes of seemingly the entire crew of the Starship Enterprise. The meeting concluded with an invitation to the Annual Scientific Meeting 2016 at the Claudelands Events Centre in Hamilton, New Zealand from 23-26 November. This important meeting marks the 50th an-niversary of the New Zealand Society of Gastroenterology and an exciting program is being developed which will cover a wide range of topics including functional GI disorders, advances in diagnostic and therapeutic endos-copy, an endoscopy video forum and prize, hepatobiliary and endoscopic ultrasound (EUS), anticoagulants and antiplatelet therapies, and endoscopy. We look forward to welcoming our friends from the World Gastroenterol-ogy Organisation to this landmark meeting in our beautiful country. Performance at the opening ceremony. Dr. Stephen Inns and friends at the confer-ence dinner.
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