Barcelona, September 18-21

The Annual PH European conference 2017 was held in Castelldefels, Barcelona (Spain) from 18-21 September.We had a record turnout of 63 pulmonary hypertension representatives from 35 countries: Albania, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Finland, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine.

Training sessions

As always, our annual conference aims to provide both educational and training opportunities for our member associations.
For the training part we organised four workshops, on different aspects that we felt were the vital for patient association empowerment: patient training, advocacy, cross border collaboration and fundraising. The workshops were moderated by PHA Europe staff members, with different member associations sharing their experiences in the relevant fields. We were very happy to see that there was a high participation also from the audience, with lots of questions and lively discussions.

For the educational part, Spanish PH medical expert Dr. Pilar Escribano, cardiologist at the 12 de Octubre Hospital in Madrid made a very interesting presentation about latest developments in PH.

Industry partner news

At the annual conference we also always like to hear the latest news from our industry partners and this year we were delighted to welcome representatives from Actelion, Arena, Bayer, Bellerephon, Ferrer, GlaxoSmithKline, MSD and Pfizer. The very interesting news from the industry included:

• a new study currently ongoing on upfront triple vs double PH combination therapy called TRITON (Actelion)
• the development of a new and potent oral prostacyclin (Arena), shortly entering phase III clinical trial
• updates on the development of a portable nitric oxide device for PH patients (Bellerephon)
• the launch of a new inhalation device for iloprost called Breelib (Bayer)
• the distribution agreement between United Therapeutics and Ferrer for treprostinil
• a new patient self management app being developed (GSK)
• the agreement between Bayer and MSD for the distribution of riociguat (MSD)

World PH Day awards

One of the highlights of the conference was the Gala Dinner, with the much awaited WPHD 2017 Awards ceremony: this year the first prize went to PHA Ireland, for their amazing awareness and fundraising initiatives , involving no less than the Irish Navy! Second and third prizes went to PHA Austria and PHA Serbia, respectively.

Check out the wonderful photos on our FB page and stay tuned for the Mariposa Winter Edition which will contain full details of the conference.