On 15-16 February 2024, the MS Center Noord Nederland and the Dept. of Biomedical Sciences of the University Medical Center Groningen will organize a two-days international scientific meeting on Microglia. We have composed a scientific program that covers microglia biology and microglia in pathology, with a focus on the demyelinating disease multiple sclerosis. On both days, several internationally renowned researchers will give lectures, complemented with 5 short talks selected from abstracts, and there will be poster sessions.

After their description by Pío del Río-Hortega, microglia were outside the focus of neuroscience research for several decades. It was the ground-breaking work of Georg Kreutzberg describing the process of microglial activation that vigorously stimulated microglia research. During the last 2 decades years, we have witnessed a large number of seminal discoveries including the origin of the microglia lineage, the role of microglia in brain development and wiring, their involvement in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. Recent advancements in microglia transcriptomics and epigenetics provided important information on microglia states and functions. More recently, the development of iPSC-derived microglial cells is another important advancement in microglia research. Most likely, many of the above-mentioned microglia features play an important role in the pathology of multiple sclerosis, and our symposium Microglia from Biology to pathology will highlight several of them.

We look forward to a very stimulating two days, the organizing committee