The traditional bi-yearly European meeting of scientists interested in the microbiology and molecular biology of the bacterial pathogen — Streptococcus pneumoniae — will be held between April 14 (Saturday) through April 17 (Tuesday), 2007 in Oeiras, Portugal at ITQB/UNL (Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica), a multi-disciplinary research institute and graduate training center which is part of the University Nova de Lisboa (http://www.itqb.unl.pt).

Co-sponsoring the meeting are the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at ITQB/UNL, Oeiras and the Laboratory of Microbiology, The Rockefeller University, New York.

Members of the organizing committee are Hermínia de Lencastre, Ph.D. (Head, Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, ITQB/UNL), Alexander Tomasz, Ph.D. (Head, Laboratory of Microbiology, The Rockefeller University), Raquel Sá-Leão, Ph.D. (Investigator, ITQB/UNL) and Mário Ramirez, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa). The previous Meeting — EUROPNEUMO-7 — was held at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (previously named GBF-German Research Center for Biotechnology) in Braunschweig, Germany in the Spring of 2005, chaired by Professors Sven Hammerschmidt and Singh Chhatwal.

Europneumo and the Pneumococcus. With more than a decade of history, the Europneumo meeting has become an informal and stimulating discussion forum for exchanging new information on the Pneumococcus — a bacterium that continues to pose serious challenges to public health and a microbe about which fundamental observations in the microbiology and molecular biology of bacterial disease continue to appear in the literature.

Europneumo and ITQB. ITQB has special ties to the science of the Pneumococcus. The origin of the international Pneumococcal Molecular Epidemiology Network (PMEN) can be traced to an international gathering at ITQB in 1995 for scientists interested in the molecular epidemiology of S. pneumoniae. In 1996 the ITQB was host to another international meeting on the "Molecular Biology of S. pneumoniae and its diseases" — updated contributions of which were published in 2000 in a book with a similar title. The bi-yearly ISPPD meetings were born as a follow-up to the 1996 meeting.