The Inaugural Meeting of the International Association of Asia-Pacific Blood Types and Genomics

On April 25th 2018, the inaugural meeting of the International Association of the Asia-Pacific Blood Types and Genomics (IAABG) was ceremoniously held in Yangzhou, kindly sponsored by Jiangsu LIBO Medicine Biotechnology Co., Ltd. About one thousand experts attended the inaugural meeting, who came from more than twenty countries and regions, including China, the United States, Britain, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Japan, Iran, Mexico, Romania, Austria, Taiwan and Hong Kong et al.

Firstly, the vice chairman of the IAABG standing council, Prof. Jiwu Gong (Director of External Quality Assessments for National Blood Transfusion Compatibility Testing, Director of the Blood Transfusion Department in the National Center for Clinical Laboratories and Beijing Hospital) made a wonderful address for the inaugural meeting. Then Prof. Siegfried Janz from the Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, USA made a brief speech giving high praise and best wishes to the establishment of the IAABG. Next, Secretary General Prof. Shuming Zhao announced and expounded the IAABG’s principal guidelines and operational rationale, including its composition and purpose, scope of endeavours and membership management. Finally, the IAABG’s vice chairman Prof. Zhongjun Li announced the IAABG’s standing council members, and expressed his warm thanks to all international members who attended, and his wishes that together we can recruit more and more experts worldwide in the future.

The IAABG is an international and non-profit academic organization composed of professional researchers, scholars and managerial staff from voluntary institutions, enterprises or units, engaged in immunohematology, blood typing, genomics and molecular biology.

The purpose of the IAABG is to unite specialists from all over the world in collaboration, by establishing cooperation via industry-university-research between Chinese domestic and international scientific research and medical institutions, to steer relevant industries towards precision diagnosis, medication, treatment and transfusion for potential shared health benefits throughout the world.