Lars K. Poulsen, Ph.D.
Head of Research, Professor
Allergy Clinic, Dept. 7551
National University Hospital
Blegdamsvej 9
DK-2100 Copenhagen O
Denmark

Fax: +45 35 45 75 81
mail: lkpallgy@mail.dk






Joining the EAACI

1.  What were your reasons for joining the Academy in the first place?
I think my first real contact with the Academy was prior to the annual meeting that was held in Copenhagen 1988. Both the president and general secretary of the meeting came from my department, so as young scientist I was recruited to do a lot of organizing work.

2.  What is your vision as the newly appointed EAACI Scientific Program Committee (SPC) Coordinator?

While it may sound ambitious to keep on increasing the number of attendants, I hope to continue the impressing trend set out by the Academy. It is also my ambition to make more Academy-members aware of the process by which a congress is created. In other words: There are many channels, such as the interest groups and sections to use, if you want to influence the programme and the content of future congresses.

Field of research

3.  What are the research projects you are currently active in?

An important project in which my group is participating is the FAST project sponsored by the EU 7. framework programme, where we intend to develop immunotherapy for food allergy. This project nicely combines our key focus areas: food allergy, immunotherapy and immunology.

Advice for young scientists

4.  How should a JMA find the right career path to follow? What should he/she consider?

As a person from one of the smaller countries in Europe, it is clearly insufficient to think of your career path in national terms: Plan to go abroad to learn and educate yourself; build up you own international contacts from an early stage; and remember that the post doc network of today may be the professor network ten years from now.

Tips for physicians and researchers

5.  Describe communication tools for better disseminating information

a. within the Academy: It would of course be easy to talk about the internet, but I have always been fascinated by the amount of communication that is distributed and shared at a scientific congress. It saves many more hours of reading. Think about it: what is the chance that you meet exactly the colleague with the right expertise in a crowd of 7000 people, but in fact that happens very often. Isn't it almost like a lymph node, where the immune cells that need to talk, actually meet and exchange information?

b. to patients: Here, mentioning of the internet becomes unavoidable. There is so much information out there, and be sure that the patients have already been on the internet before they turn up in your practice. Here I believe that it really takes a large effort by institutions such as the Academy, the National Societies and Patient Organisations to present reliable and valid information, and to make this information stand up among all the noise.

c. the general public: With the increasing prevalence of allergies there is unfortunately not longer a large distinction between the patients and the general public. In many countries the prevalence is now at a rate where most people would have allergics among their close friends and families.

Allergies in the 21st century

6.  What are the environmental factors responsible for the great increase in allergy prevalence nowadays?

Now, if we had a good answer to this question, I believe that a whole new era would open for our specialty. In my opinion, we do not yet know the answer, but in these years extremely exciting findings are emerging on the interplay between the innate immune system and the part of the cognate immunity which leads to formation of specific IgE. Only when we have a response to this question, we can for the first time really offer an advice to society about primary prevention, like other large disease entities such as cardio-vascular diseases and cancer, have been doing for many years.

Career motivation

7.  Is there enough motivation for conducting biomedical research? Does that vary from one European country to another?

There is no doubt that the financial crisis in its different versions will greatly impact the health care and the education systems, which are where the biomedical research mostly takes place - at least at the early stages in a career path. One can only hope that the politicians on national and European levels will try to take an offensive strategy that develops European competitiveness in this area.

EAACI Activities (Annual Congress, Mini-Congresses, Allergy Schools)

8.  Which of the activities do you find most interesting in the Academy?

I would be a poor SPC-coordinator if I did not find the Annual Congresses the most interesting, wouldn't I? Our congresses are still the flagship, which Wikipedia conveniently defines as "the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, a designation given on account of being either the largest, fastest, newest, most heavily armed or, for publicity purposes, the best known". And this is exactly what the Annual Congresses are: the largest, fastest (way to new knowledge), newest (science), most heavily armed (in terms of resources invested by the Academy), and of course most well-known.

9.  Which ones do you find most educating?

Well, I think this might be clear from the above answer...