Dear friends of WARMTH,
It is time to say good-bye to a difficult year going by and we all sincerely hope that the coming year brings to us a safe world to live and work in with our families and friends.
The year 2020 saw us going through difficult times and we all tried to find solutions in different unique ways to survive and keep us healthy and safe from the ongoing pandemic which we guess is the worst ever year as experienced by any of us in our lifetime. Thankfully things appear to be under control in most of the countries and all of us are gradually limping back towards normalcy. The current news of the mutated new deadly strain of the COVID 19 has dampened our year-end spirits a bit but let us hope it is like a passing dark piece of cloud that should go away soon. Once again heartfelt condolences on behalf of WARMTH for those WARMTH members who have passed recently.
We are happy that amongst all these hardships we were still able to keep our mission of education unabated and were successful in conducting virtual educational programs ourselve
s and also in collaborations with other organizations throughout the year. The first important activity was a series of webinars and information on the COVID 19 pandemic and its impact on the practice of Nuclear Medicine and radionuclide therapy which was organized by the Nuclear Medicine and Diagnostic Imaging Section of the IAEA spearheaded by Dr Diana Paez. The IPET 2020 organised over 3 days during the month of November, was also a resounding success with dedicated lectures on PET and theragnostic. This was also organized by IAEA with WARMTH as one of the collaborators. Invited speakers from WARMTH delivered lectures on Thyroid, Neuroendocrine tumors, and Prostate cancer during IPET-2020.
We ended this year with the WARMTH’s annual meeting ICRT-2020 on a virtual platform due to the ongoing difficult situation. The 15th ICRT was originally planned to be held at Cox Bazar in Bangladesh. The meeting was organized on a virtual platform with Prof. Raihan Hussain as the congress president. It was spearheaded by WARMTH’s COO Mr. Josh Mailman who organized the recording of lectures and other complete logistic support in terms of streaming and organization of the complete conference. All of you will be happy to know that we received 300 plus registrations and the two-day meeting was completely glitch-free. We are thankful to our sponsors of ICRT 2020 for their generosity during this difficult period. The lectures are all available on WARMTH’s website and our YouTube channel for each one to revisit the same.
Furthermore, our retrospective study under the lead of Hojjat Ahmadzadehfar, Bonn, Germany, WARMTH's Retrospective Multi-centric Analysis of Castration Refractory Metastatic Prostate Cancer Patients Treated by Lu-PSMA-617, has been published this year in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. I wish to congratulate the contributors to the study and Hojjat for compiling and analyzing the multi-centric data and making it see the light of the day. I am sure most of us have read it and request those who haven’t to read it. It’s a wonderful paper and I am sure it will have many citations in the coming years.
Margarida Rodrigues, Innsbruck, Austria is working on another WARMTH Retrospective Study: Multicenter Analysis of 68Ga-Somatostatin Receptor and 18F-FDG-PET/CT (Dual-Tracer Imaging) in Neuroendocrine Tumor Patients Treated With Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy. This study has have been approved by the Ethical Commission of the Medical University Innsbruck. The participating centers so far are Germany, India, South Africa, Italy, Australia, Austria, Finland, Turkey, China, Uruguay, and Jordan. Anyone of you who are still interested can join in by sending your data to Margarida.
We would also like to bring to your notice that Qaisar Siraj, who has been performing the duties of the Editor in Chief of our prestigious WARMTH journal the World Journal of Nuclear Medicine since 2019, has been doing a commendable job and we are happy to say that the quality of the published articles and the readership is showing a steady rise.
We sincerely hope that the coming year makes the world a safe place to live in, brings peace, and allows unrestricted travel to consolidate our friendship bonds and sharing of knowledge. You will be pleased to know that we have planned a series of webinars on Theragnostics in the coming year in collaboration with the British Institute of Radiology (BIR) being put in place by our active member Gopinath Gnanasegaran. We are also planning to conduct a course on the application of Theragnostics for our members in the coming year.
We take this opportunity, on behalf of the WARMTH board, to convey our season’s greetings to all of you and wish all a happy, peaceful, safe, healthy, and most importantly “unmasked” 2021.
My dear friends, at this time of ongoing crisis, let us join hands to continue protecting our patients, their caregivers, our staff, and families. We urge you to stay safe, stay healthy, practice physical distancing but social solidarity till we physically meet again.
As we say in India: “Jan Hai toh Jahan Hai” meaning if you have life, you have the world. Let us try to go beyond the small issues, think big, focus on the big things and rise to our potential.
With our WARMTHly wishes
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| Partha Choudhury | Mike Sathekge |
| President WARMTH | President-Elect WARMTH |