Dear Colleagues,
Please see attached the minutes of our last meeting, held in Oakland on September 23 in conjunction with the KIR Polymorphism 2009 meeting. We were very happy to have so many of you in attendance, either in person or virtually (via phone or skype) --in total twelve IDAWG members participated in the meeting, and the discussion was lively and productive. As always, we encourage anyone who can not make a scheduled meeting in person to call or videoconference in, please let us know if you would like to do so and we will make the necessary arrangements.
Regarding our next meeting, this is scheduled to take place in conjunction with the 2009 ASHI meeting to be held in San Francisco in a few weeks. Our meeting is tentatively scheduled for Monday afternoon, November 2, exact time and meeting room TBD. We are waiting to hear back from ASHI regarding the scheduling details, as well as more information about our planned presentation to the Scientific Clinical Affairs Committee (SCAC). SCAC will consider making the IDAWG a subcommittee of SCAC, and Derek Middleton has been proposed to act as the liaison between our group and ASHI. We are attaching a tentative agenda for the meeting of the IDAWG, as well as that for our presentation to SCAC. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions on these.
Finally, during our last meeting, there was discussion (please see attached minutes for details) about an invitation to write a commentary for Tissue Antigens regarding the need for community consensus for immunogenomic data standards. We would like as many of the IDAWG members who agree to do so to be authors on this. If you would like to contribute to this commentary, please let us know which particular topics you would like to address. We are attaching a very preliminary draft outline for the commentary, and would appreciate any and all input from the group.
We hope this email finds you all well, and we are looking forward to seeing many of you at ASHI in a few weeks. We would like to have a meeting of the group in conjunction with the upcoming ASEATTA meeting as well; we are working on the logistics for that meeting, if you have not already done so, please let us know if you will be able to attend or participate. As always, thank you for participating in this working group. This update will also be posted to the website, www.igdawg.org.
Many thanks,
Jill and Steve