Dear colleagues and friends,

It is our great pleasure to invite you to the third European Mechanical Circulatory Support Summit hosted in Bad Oeynhausen this year. New generation devices have improved greatly over the last years, showing outstanding clinical results. Inevitably, this will lead to the application of this most promising technology to a wider spectrum of patients recognizing the demands of end-stage heart failure in a stagnant field of cardiac transplantation. New questions concerning alternative Mechanical Circulatory Support to transplantation come up, whereas other applications enter clinical routine. Consensus guidelines for the management of VAD patients and most importantly their selection are to be developed to ensure highest quality for this severely diseased cohort.

This year’s meeting will present the latest trials and trends in conservative therapy of ESHF as well as alternative approaches with strong emphasis on biological solutions. Professor Stefan Engelhardt from Munich will outline the potential of Cardiac Micro RNAs as new therapeutic targets, a topic rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Andrew Fire and Craig Mello in 2006.

Adjunct and alternative surgical surgeries have matured to be discussed controversially during lectures and discussions. In order to group scientific data as a platform for above-mentioned guidelines EUROVAD and INTERMACS registries show different approaches.

The still open question on options following short-term support is another main focus to be exploited. Experiences with the management of patients leaving the hospital, pursuing a near normal life grow daily. It is a great privilege to welcome Professor Erwin Deutsch, professor emeritus of civil and medical law at the University of Göttingen, an internationally well recognized legal expert with special interest in clinical and biomedical research. Professor Deutsch will outline legal and social security aspects of out of hospital care, issues that need to be addressed since outpatients will increase inevitably.

We would like to encourage everybody to be inspired by the interactive ambience of this meeting to contribute to each session’s panel discussion freely.

Furthermore, it is a pleasure to welcome Michiel Morshuis succeeding Aly El-Banayosy as the new head of the Department of Mechanical Circulatory Support at Bad Oeynhausen and Sebastian Schulte-Eistrup, who contributed extensively to the development and realization of this meeting.

We hope that EUMS 2008 will encourage all of us to further pursue our passion for this interesting field of circulatory support in cardiovascular therapy. We are looking forward to seeing you in December in Bad Oeynhausen for this exciting scientific event.

Reiner Koerfer, M. D.

Alain Pavie, M. D.