As President of the International Association of Pancreatology (IAP) for 2025, it was my privilege and honour to host the 2025 Pancreas Summit – the combined IAP and Australasian Pancreatic Club (APC) meeting in Melbourne, Australia. The Scientific Organising Committee comprised the APC President Professor Stephen Philcox and myself as Co-chairs, Dr Chamini Perera as Deputy Chair, and Drs George Sharbeen, Sumit Sahni, Dan Croagh, Andrew Metz, Brett Knowles, Tony Pang, Keith Ooi and Saurabh Gupta as committee members. With the help of this enthusiastic hard-working committee, we were able to put on a scientific programme that was highly appreciated by everyone who attended this meeting. We had 265 registrants in total, with 22 international invited faculty as well as numerous national invited faculty. The attendees included pancreatologists not only from Australia and New Zealand but also China, India, USA and Europe making for a truly vibrant meeting with abundant opportunities for the exchange of ideas and sharing of new research. A total of 107 abstracts were submitted to the meeting, a significant number given the location of this meeting. Of note, the IAP funded 23 travel awards – 13 international and 10 national – to enable early career and mid-career researchers to attend this meeting.
The programme consisted of cutting-edge topics such as Artificial Intelligence in pancreatic disease, Fatty pancreas, the role of the microbiome in pancreatic health and disease and novel approaches to therapies for pancreatic pain, acute and chronic pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer. An important feature of the program was that each day not only featured concurrent basic and clinical science sessions, but also at least one combined basic and clinical science session offering an opportunity for basic and clinical researchers to exchange ideas and discuss cutting edge research. Another unique feature of our scientific programme was the involvement of dietitians with an interest in optimum nutrition of patients with pancreatic diseases. The dietitians had a one day focussed meeting and also actively participated in the main meeting providing a rare but highly beneficial nexus.
The Pancreas Summit was the first major international ‘exclusively pancreas-focused’ meeting to be held in Australia since 2007 and was appreciated by all attendees as a very successful conference. We are very grateful for the efforts that were put in by our sponsors as well as by the invited faculty and all the presenters who made this meeting a forum to share ideas, discuss innovative treatment strategies, and collaborate on initiatives that will shape the future of pancreatic disease management and drive progress in our field.
Minoti Apte, OAM
Immediate Past President, IAP