Silvio Danese © ECCO

Dear ECCO Family,

I want to personally thank everyone who attended the ECCO Congress in Copenhagen.  ECCO 2019 can proudly be defined as the biggest IBD meeting in the world. I am very happy about the increasing number of participants, which this year totalled 8034 from 98 countries. ECCO 2019 once again offered top science, with 144 abstracts presented and 1012 abstracts accepted. And obviously, a special thank you is due to all the invited speakers for their outstanding presentations and to the ECCO Committee Members for ensuring the success of the meeting.

Silvio Danese © ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

While we wait a few more months for our ECCO Congress 2019 and are getting ready to face another cold winter, I would like to give you an update on the latest ECCO Initiatives for the meeting, which are the result of much hard work by all the ECCO Committees.

Silvio Danese  ©  ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

Summer has passed and I truly hope you had a great vacation.

We are approaching fall with great enthusiasm and looking forward to the new Educational Activities that are scheduled for the upcoming 14^th Congress of ECCO, which will be held in Copenhagen in March 2019. In order to enhance competence and knowledge in IBD and patients’ care, education is one of our top priorities.

Silvio Danese  ©  ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

Improving the care of IBD patients is one of ECCO’s most valuable purposes. This goal is achieved through enhancement of our knowledge of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. Two programmes highlighted in this issue of ECCO News move in this direction: The UR-CARE database, which seeks to achieve this goal through intense collaboration between researchers in Europe via a shared database, and the e-CCO Learning Platform, which many of you had the opportunity to experience during the 13th ECCO Congress in Vienna. This intiative is particularly exciting because it offers physicians a tool to fill in learning gaps using the ECCO IBD Curriculum. Both of these tools will contribute to reinforce the excellence of IBD centres.

Silvio Danese  ©  ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

Thank you to everyone for once again making the ECCO Congress, Europe’s most important event in the field of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), such a wonderful occasion. Held this year in Vienna, the Congress attracted 6,676 participants from over 80 countries and the number of accepted abstracts surpassed 1,000.  Thank you especially to our invited speakers for delivering such exciting presentations and also to the ECCO Committee Members for their hard work and dedication, which helped to make the Congress so successful. 

Julián Panés  ©  ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

We are witnessing an exciting period in the development of new therapies for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. New therapeutic targets, and new classes of drugs, are being integrated into our therapeutic armamentarium. However, when we consider the proportion of patients who respond to induction therapy and, among those, the fraction who achieve remission during maintenance, the percentage of initially treated patients in whom the disease is satisfactorily controlled over one year does not exceed 15%–30%.