The 7th Cell Death & Disease Symposium on Translational Medicine was held in Changzhou, China on Oct. 18th and 19th, 2016.

The main focus of this symposium is “Translational Medicine”. At the symposium, 17 internationally renowned experts from United States, Scotland, Italy, Australia and China presented their exciting up-to-date research on subtopics of “Microenvironment and Diseases”, “Cell Death and Diseases”, “Stem Cell and Diseases” and “Immunity and Diseases”. The Editor-in-Chief of Cell Death & Differentiation Prof. Gerry Melino made a speech on “How to write a scientific paper” and described the whole process of publishing, from drafting a manuscript to the peer review process through to publication. Often researchers receive no direct instruction on how to go about this, but instead are expected to pick up the correct procedures from supervisors and colleagues. As such, this session was of interest to the range of participants in the publishing process: from less experienced authors to those undertaking peer review.

This symposium has created a forum for the interaction among scientists in China and from other parts of the world and also provided a platform for development of collaboration opportunities. It gave a succinct update on mechanistic and translational aspects of cell death suppression in cancer covering topics within immunology, stem cell biology, genetics and signaling as well as diseases. Although several mechanisms have been resolved, as numerous speakers highlighted during their talks, many questions still remain and more arise as new theories emerge and there is still a lot of work to be done for researchers interested in biomedical research.

The symposium was co-sponsored by the Institute of Health Sciences (IHS), Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)/Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine; The First People’s Hospital of Changzhou; Cell Death & Disease; Soochow University and Shanghai Society for Cell Biology. Director of The First People’s Hospital of Changzhou, Prof. HE Xiaozhou, Editor-in-Chief of Cell Death & Differentiation Prof. Gerry Melino and director of the Campbell Family for Breast Cancer Research at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre Prof. Tak W. Mak attended the symposium and delivered speech in the opening ceremony.