ISTH launches new ‘Congress Chronicle’ series leading up to 2025 Congress

June 2024

In this new series, Guy Young, Chair of the 2025 Annual Congress Planning Committee, and other guest authors share an inside look at the planning for the ISTH 2025 Congress in Washington, D.C.

The series will be published every other month over the next year leading up to the 2025 Congress. Readers will enjoy topics such as details about the venue, the city, the program and much more. Visit www.isth.org for future installments.

Below is the first installment of the Congress Chronicle by Guy Young, Riitta Lassila, M.D., Ph.D., and Alisa Wolberg, Ph.D.

A brief history of Congress planning

ISTH Congresses have been taking place for decades—in fact, ISTH 2024 in Bangkok is the 32nd Congress of the ISTH. Until recently in 2019, the ISTH Congress took place every two years with the Scientific and Standardization Committee (SSC) meetings taking place in the other years. Unfortunately, in 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the annual Congresses, though the meetings did take place virtually, but it is challenging to have the same impact as an in-person meeting.

Those who have attended meetings in the past may be familiar with the concept of the Local Organizing Committee (LOC). Unlike most other societies, for decades the ISTH sought applications from Society members to host the meeting in their home cities. The selected center would have a Congress President (typically the lead physician/scientist applicant) and this President would assemble an LOC comprised of mostly experts from their city and country, though there were no strict rules regarding this.

One of the challenges of this approach is that each LOC would organize the program in the manner in which they saw fit. This resulted in each Congress having different themes with a different emphasis. For example, one congress might have 60 abstract categories, and another would have 90 categories. Also, one meeting would emphasize more of one aspect of thrombosis and hemostasis or more clinical science and less basic science.

It was clear that it was time to transform and enhance the meeting logistics and structure. The ISTH Council formed an Annual Meeting Taskforce, which led to the decision to centralize the organization of all future Congresses, and this led to the formation of the Annual Congress Planning Committee (ACPC). The ACPC was inaugurated in 2022 and the ISTH 2024 Congress in Bangkok will be the first one to be organized by the ACPC rather than an LOC.

What exactly is the ACPC?

As the name implies, this is the committee that is charged with planning the annual Congress; however, it is not just the ACPC that develops the various sessions. In fact, much of that work is done by the Theme Committees (see more below).

The ACPC is comprised of nine members: Chair, Vice Chair (who succeeds the Chair the following year), Basic Science and Clinical Chair (and respective Vice Chairs), and liaisons from the SSC, the Education Committee, and the Early Career Committee (see figure 1). The ACPC Chair is appointed by the ISTH Council and each Chair then selects his/her own Basic Science and Clinical Chair. The liaisons are selected by the Chair and the SSC Executive (for the SSC liaison), Education Committee Chair (for the Education liaison) and the Early Career Committee (for the ECC liaison). Learn more about the ACPC leadership here.

Before the meeting planning began, the first task of the ACPC was to develop a general approach as to how to organize the annual Congress and to address a variety of governance issues.

Recall that each LOC would have different themes, different abstract categories—well, a lot of different things. In order to provide better organization and long-term consistency, one of the first things we did was to make specific themes that would be used for the development of the plenaries, the state-of-the-art session (SOA) and the abstracts.

Figure 2 lists all the themes—14 in all with six basic science themes, seven clinical themes and one for nursing and allied health.

We then formed a Theme Committee for each theme with a Theme Leader, Vice Theme Leader and other committee members. The task of each Theme Committee is to recommend all the sessions at the meetings (i.e., plenary sessions, SOAs and master classes). The Theme Committees also organize the abstracts that come to their themes into the Oral and Poster Sessions. Ultimately, the ACPC will review all of the Theme Committee recommendations and select and organize the sessions for the congress. Similarly, the ACPC will take the recommendations of the Theme Committees regarding the abstracts and make the final decisions on the selection and placement of the abstracts.

The ACPC meets in person three times per year, first at the annual Congress to begin the planning for the following congress, then in September (to finalize the program) and lastly in March (to finalize the abstracts). In addition, we have at least one virtual meeting per month and occasional ad hoc meetings. It is not small task to be on the ACPC and time commitment is significant.

As mentioned, there are also many governance issues being addressed by the ACPC, some of which have been completed in advance of the 2024 meeting (such as the themes) and more that are still in development. These include a speaker policy and policies regarding ACPC and Theme Committee membership, as well as others. These policies are critical for the future organization of the ACPC and the Congress. ACPC members are hard at work constructing these now.

Members of the 2025 ACPC

With all that said, let me introduce to you the 2025 ACPC:

I am extremely honored and humbled to serve as the Chair of the ACPC for the 2025 Congress to be held in Washington, D.C in the United States. In the next edition of this newsletter in August, I will discuss the city of Washington, D.C., itself in detail. I look forward to sharing my connections to this city. (A brief note: I’d like to emphasize that the fact I have a connection to where the Congress will take place is entirely coincidental as my appointment to serve as the 2025 Chair was made before Washington, D.C. was selected.)

For the Basic Science and Clinical Chair, I chose two extraordinarily talented and successful women, Alisa Wolberg, a world-renowned basic scientist and incredible mentor (in fact, she is a 2024 winner of the ISTH Outstanding Mentor Award) from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S., and Riitta Lassila, an equally world-renowned clinical researcher from Helsinki, Finland.

The ACPC Vice Chair is Walter Ageno and his Basic Science and Clinical Chairs are Francoise Dignat George and Cihan Ay. All three are equally well-known in the hemostasis and thrombosis world and will support the Chairs in organizing the 2025 Congress. The other three members are the liaisons from the Education Committee (Geoff Barnes), the SSC (Joost Meijers) and the Early Career Committee (Aaron Iding). View the list of members here.

All of us are very excited to be working together to put on a fantastic program for you. We hope you are planning to attend and share the news with your colleagues and friends in the field.

What’s coming up next

We will publish this ISTH 2025 Congress series every other month at www.isth.org. I’ll be joined by several other authors who will detail fantastic new information on the venue, the city, and the program in the coming months. Each edition will have a short quiz with questions related to various topics around the meeting and Washington, DC.

I wish you all a wonderful meeting in Bangkok and then a fantastic summer. I hope you can take some time off for a likely much needed vacation. In case you are wondering, I will take some vacation time with my wife to visit Seattle and Olympic National Park not far from there and another vacation exploring national parks and national monuments in Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota in the U.S.

See below for the first quiz—good luck!

Washington, D.C. pop quiz

*Answers can be found at the end.

1. When was the last time that ISTH took place in Washington, DC?

A. 1991

B. 1999

C. 2009

D. It was never held in Washington, D.C.

2. Which city hosted the last full ISTH Congress in the U.S.?

A. Boston, 2009

B. Milwaukee, 2014

C. Montreal, 2023* (trick answer—not a U.S. city)

D. Seattle, 2005

3. Washington, D.C. was the third city to serve as the capital of the U.S. after the Constitution was ratified in 1787. Which two cities served as the temporary capitals before Washington, D.C. became the permanent capital in 1800?

A. Boston and New York

B. New York and Philadelphia

C. Boston and Philadelphia

D. Philadelphia and Alexandria, Virginia

4. How many airports serve the Washington, D.C. area (if you are flying, you will fly into one of these airports)?

A. 1

B. 2

C. 3

D. 4


Answer key:

B: 1999

A: Boston, 2009

B: New York and Philadelphia

C: 3 airports

Figures: