I think we're going to get started. I'm Brian Cole. And I want to welcome all of you to Chicago. It's a perfect weekend to be in Chicago and be indoors, right? This is what we have to offer. So if you're going to be in Rosemont, this is the kind of day you want. I clearly want to start out by thanking my co-chairs, Jason Dragoo and Rachel Frank. I just do a lot of the, I participate in a lot of these continuing education courses, sort of our academic philanthropy. And I was just speaking to Jason beforehand and saying that oftentimes when you help establish these courses, and this is brand new, never been done before in an academy setting, AOSSM or other specialty society. He's been really instrumental in helping fortify the lab, which is complicated. This isn't really your traditional OLC course because there's an element of didactics to it. And there's a lot of organizational aspects that we just needed help. So I want to thank him for that. And Rachel, your contributions to the agenda, super important. These are really hard things to do on our own. And also to thank the Heathers at AOSSM, who have been outstanding helping keep moving this forward. This course is sold out pretty early. In fact, they created a sidetrack for didactics only. The challenge is that a lot of the issues on biologics are related to didactics and then some lab aspects. And what I have found over time is the things that are most challenging to people is how do we actually do some of these procedures? They're not really that intimidating. But if you've never done them before, we almost think that we should be able to do this without much practice. Having the lab in a non-threatening way and having the vendors here to help us is particularly important. So it's a really good environment to learn something that you won't necessarily learn on your own. Whether or not you do these procedures in your office, you do them in the operating room, or you have your primary care sports people do them, or physiatrists or other, at least you'll get familiar on how this stuff gets done. The course itself, we wanted it to be somewhat case-based and really pragmatic. This concept of, you'll hear a little bit about this later, this concept of regenerative medicine is, it's very provocative, as we all know, and sometimes it's a little unclear who's driving the bus, whether it's our patients, the media, or those of us in practice. And we sort of have a really important ethical consideration because there's so much misperception. So when we put the agenda together, it was really important for us to remain very grounded and try to stay as evidence-based as possible and stay away from the gee whiz stuff. That's, oh yeah, this works, this works great. And do our best to stay away from the anecdotal. But some of the challenges are the level of research in this space compared to other things that we do as orthopedic surgeons is still in its orphancy, in its infancy, I should say, and orphancy. And I think because of that, we were taking a very pragmatic look at it and giving you what we know and have the opportunity for plenty of interaction with the faculty, many of whom are experts in biologics. So I kind of like the term orthobiologics, but truth be told, there are opportunities for regenerative medicine in what we do. And I think we're just really in the beginning of our ability to do the things we truly want to do and what the public wants us to do. But this is a great way to lay a foundation and a landscape. So the course has a didactic component, which is today, there'll be some really pragmatic aspects, and tomorrow will be larger lab-based, but we'll also have a number of videos that the faculty will present on some of the techniques to get you warmed up for the lab session. I wanted to, if you just turn around real quick, Kay, you can watch people look at you now. Dr. Kay Horsch is in the back there, just to introduce him. Kay is the director of the Ahn Foundation, and the reason I'm bringing this up in the slides is just to introduce you to him and to the Ahn Foundation. This is something that I've been part of for two years now, that they are actually a partner with this meeting. And I wanna just take a minute and explain who they are. Essentially, the vision statement is to create a network that's international, that's not corporate-biased or corporate-based of individuals who are interested in orthobiologics, orthoregeneration, and so forth. And in full transparency, it comes from a family business in Switzerland that's called Geischlich, but they really don't have much identity with the company, and the Ahn Foundation is really family money from a group of individuals who are truly philanthropic, and they're not asking for anything. It's truly a partnership in promoting research and education in regenerative medicine, and I was privileged to be asked to help start their mission and it's actually given, it's been a great privilege because I've had the opportunity now to work with a number of specialty societies in the United States to get access to funding that's supporting evidence-based research, both clinical medicine and basic science. So this is a group of individuals who have come together over the last two years, and their basic mission is to promote research and education and to create a network of individuals, and it's really a network of those of you who have had enough interest to come to this meeting. And I would ask, they have a booth, as all of our exhibitors do, and again, these meetings are very difficult to even break even without the help of the exhibitors, that you just take a minute on the breaks. There's plenty of time for coffee and snacks. Just take a couple of minutes and spend your time in the foyer there to get to know our exhibitors because they're here for a specific reason. They really want to get to know you, and that's the only thing I would ask of you besides being engaged while you're here is to take a couple of minutes to do that. With respect to the Ahn Foundation, these are the guys who are involved. You may know some of them, and Kaye is the executive director, Norba Pasudi, myself, Raleigh Yacob, Andreas Geischlich, who's the founder. It's a family business, and again, this is just their philanthropic arm. It's basically like a family foundation, and they have dedicated a significant amount of money towards supporting orthopedic research. Joe Lane, who I had the privilege of spending a year with in special surgery, Mattia Steinwax, Paul Note, who's on the administrative side, and Myron Spector, so a lot of people much smarter than I am, to be frank. Some of the best board meetings I've ever been to just because I had the opportunity to interface with these guys, and basically, the way they're handling it, which I think is a smart way to do it, is through collaboration, so they've now collaborated with each of these organizations, some of them more than once at their annual meetings, instructional course lectures, and so forth, and the only thing I would ask is, if you just take one minute when you're out in the foyer to stop at the booth, K has an iPad, just register for the foundation. You're not gonna get a bunch of crazy emails, I promise. You will get access to grants for basic science, clinical medicine. We have two people who got scholarships to this meeting. Are they here? If you don't mind raising your hand if you're in the room. Great, so I think it's awesome that you guys applied for it, and the reason you're here is because the Yon Foundation is funding that, and they're not asking for anything, quite frankly. I know it's hard to believe, but there's no ulterior motive. So the bottom line is they're trying to connect scientists and practitioners around the world, but primarily in the United States and Europe, and these are the activities that the Yon Foundation is involved with, providing educational grants to attend an educational event like these two individuals today, providing scholarships to attend educational events, fellowship programs, traveling fellowships with the ICRS. They'll be supporting scientific contributions. We'll be awarded various amounts of money between $1,000 and $2,000 typically, and probably the best part, and the reason that I'm involved is to find funding for innovative research and to provide grants. So for example, at ANNA next year, John Kelly's the program chair. Lou McIntyre's president during that time. They're going to support a $25,000 grant for basic science. We're gonna identify a problem, do a call to action for that problem, let the audience vote on what a good thing to look at is, and have people submit grants for that problem. So we're gonna do rotator cuff for that meeting. So just some really innovative thinking that will help further and answer some questions that you're gonna probably leave here with more questions than answers, unfortunately, but it'll at least stimulate you to think in that regard. So final slide on this, to learn more about it, you can go and sign up on my, you can see it there, my.onfoundation.org, but make it easy on yourself. Don't write it down. Just stop, visit with Kay for a minute. He'll quickly enter your information. And also, yeah, there's a raffle. So there's a shoe company in Switzerland. I have these shoes that are super lightweight and they're actually pretty good looking. They're running shoes. So Kay and I were at the Bulls game the other night. We talked to him. I said, why don't we do a raffle? We can just get people to do it. So any shoe of your choice from the On Foundation, whoever signs up, what are you gonna do? Just pull a random name of the guys who signed up, the individuals who signed up, Kay, is that right? We'll pull an individual's name out of it. So if you sign up, you have a chance to win a pair of On shoes, okay? Arnie, wouldn't you like that? Wouldn't that be awesome? You'd like to run again? I just wanna run again. We'll figure a way to do it to this meeting, all right? Get you running again. Okay, all right, so with that, again, I wanna thank you for being here. I'm particularly excited to see a lot of people I know and people I haven't seen in years. So obviously, there's a vast level of interest in orthobiologics. So we're gonna start out. Now I'm gonna bring up Rachel Frank, and who's gonna just introduce the topic. Again, one of the co-chairs, looking at a high level, what are orthobiologics, what are they, and what do they mean for us? Thank you very much for being here, guys.

Brian Cole

Chicago

orthobiologics

regenerative medicine

Anh Foundation