At the beginning of December 2019, the StoneLab Scientific Symposium at the American Urological Association (AUA) Headquarters in Linthicum, Maryland, USA, brought together a wide range of scientists, clinicians and sponsors engaged in kidney stone disease (KSD) and related areas. Co-sponsored by the AUA and the Endourological Society with programmatic support from the ROCK Society, meeting Chairs Khurshid Ghani (University of Michigan) and Ben H. Chew (University of British Columbia, Chair of Research of the Endourological Society) created a truly multidisciplinary symposium with a wide and varied scope.

Credit: P. Morgan/Springer Nature Limited

“As KSD is an increasing health-care burden and new technologies for treatment and data analysis are becoming established, we felt a meeting that brings together endourologists with scientists at the forefront of these techniques could help catalyse the next wave of ideas and collaborative research in KSD,” Ghani tells Nature Reviews Urology. “Thus, the overall aim of the StoneLab symposium was to improve collaboration and the generation of new ideas to advance the field and patient care.”

Supported by a planning committee of a further 10 key experts in KSD, the team designed an exciting 2-day programme that attracted ~150 attendees, resulting in the largest scientific meeting hosted at the AUA headquarters to date. Creating an inclusive and collaborative symposium format while maintaining focus on the application of ideas and concepts to KSD-focused research and care was essential to ensure that the participants from diverse professional backgrounds would benefit.

“We realized the meeting had to be directed by talks from the scientists with panel discussions moderated by the urologists,” explains Ghani. “Content included exciting discoveries in stone biology and formation: geobiology, chemistry, crystallization and microbiome. Engineering advances to break up stones was another area, as well as mechanisms of ureteral drug delivery and biomechanics of upper tract dysfunction. We had a session on how to put everything together using big data and machine learning, as these will soon be important tools. Finally, we looked at the process of scientific discovery and intellectual property with a session on research funding, working with the FDA and commercialization of inventions with the potential to improve clinical care.”

The panel sessions at the end of each round of themed talks provided the opportunity to discuss presentations among all participants, ensuring that new insights became relevant and applicable to all attendees. The format was key in fulfilling the symposium aim of ‘thinking outside the box’ in the search for advances in KSD treatment.

“The meeting was a great way for people with similar interests to meet and make connections and we had terrific feedback from researchers, urologists and industry: everyone found it an incredibly stimulating meeting,” summarizes Chew. “Our plan is to use this symposium as a starting point to keep the conversation going. Taking new relationships and collaborations to the next level is a challenge but, as one of the speakers said, “collaborate until it hurts” and that is how we will advance medical care for our patients.”