Historical Notes
The Italian Purine Club was founded in Milan in 1991 by Flaminio Cattabeni, Lina Puglisi and Maria P. Abbracchio of the local University as a nonprofit scientific association gathering all the academic, industrial, preclinical and clinical researchers interested into the pathophysiology of purinergic transmission.
The idea of the Club originated from informal scientific meetings involving scientists from several Italian universities and research Institutions that had been held locally starting from 1989, and from informal discussions of Italian scientists with Prof. Geoffrey Burnstock of UCL London, the “father” of the purinergic transmission, who enthusiastically fostered the Purine Club initiative.
The first official international activity of the Italian Purine Club was the Purines ‘92 meeting held in Milan in June 1992 in the beautiful settings of the Ca' Granda, the old site of the University of Milan, that witnessed the enthusiastic participation of more than 500 scientists from all over the world. This forum of lively and informal scientific exchange fostered the Italian Purine Club to open internationally, with the establishment of the National Purine Club Chapters, that were officially approved on the occasion of the "Adenosine and Adenine Nucleotides" meeting held in Philadelphia, USA, in 1994. That decision set the basis for the formal opening of the German, the Spanish, the Japanese, North American, the UK, the Danish, and, more recently, the Brasilian Purine Club.
On the occasion of the Philadelphia meeting, it was also agreed by the scientific community to "merge" the new Purines series of meetings started in Milan in 1992 with the previous already ongoing "Adenosine and Adenine Nucleotides" conferences, that were being held throughout the world every four years. On this basis, in the subsequent years the following international conferences were organized:
Purines 1996 (Milan, Italy)
Purines 1998 (Ferrara, Italy)
Purine 2000 (Madrid, Spain)
Purines 2002 (Gold Coast, Australia)
Purines 2004 (Chapel Hill, USA)
Purines 2006 (Ferrara, Italy)
Purines 2008 (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Purines 2010 (Tarragona, Spain)
Purines 2012 (Fukuoka, Japan)
Purines 2014 (Bonn, Germany)
Purines 2016 (Vancouver, Canada)
(For the full list of upcoming conferences, please see the section “events”)
Besides these conferences, during the "Medicinal Chemistry And Pharmacology Of Purinergic Receptors" workshop (Satellite of the 14th Camerino-Nordwijkerhout Symposium), held in Camerino (Italy) in 2003, it was set to start the series of the Joint Italian-German Purine Club Meetings. These conferences have been regularly held in the alternate years between one main International Purines Conference and the other:
1st Joint Italian-German Purine Club Meeting 2005 (Chieti, Italy)
2nd Joint Italian-German Purine Club Meeting 2007 (Leipzig, Germany)
3rd Joint Italian-German Purine Club Meeting 2009 (Camerino, Italy)
4th Joint Italian-German Purine Club Meeting 2011 (Bonn, Germany)
5th Joint Italian-German Purine Club Meeting 2013 (Rimini, Italy)
6th Joint Italian-German Purine Club Meeting 2013 (Hamburg, Germany)
Additional congresses on purinergic transmission were also organized on specific topics and on volunteer basis, such as the 1st International Workshop on Nucleotides and their Receptors in the Immune System (held in Ferrara in 2000), and the conference for the assignment of the prestigious Gold Medal of the University of Ferrara to Prof. Geoffrey Burnstock, held in Ferrara in 2009.
Another important activity of the Italian Purine Club that perfectly fits with its educational and scientific mission has been the establishment of the Giuliana Fassina Prize, in the memory of Prof. Giuliana Fassina of the University of Padua, Italy, who, besides being an excellent scientist in the purinergic field, had also inspired the original Statutes of the Purine Club, based on her experience with the former Lipid Club, another Italian scientific nonprofit initiative to which she had personally contributed.
The Fassina Prize to distinguished scientists for extraordinary contributions to the purinergic field was first assigned to Dr. Kenneth A. Jacobson of The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA, on the occasion of the Purines '96 meeting in Milan.
Since then, the Price has been assigned to Prof. Luiz Belardinelli (delivered in occasion of the 8th International Symposium on Adenosine and Adenine Nucleotides held in Ferrara in 2006), to Prof. Peter Illes of the University of Leipzig, Germany (delivered to him in person on the occasion of the Joint German-Italian Purine Club meeting held in July 2011 in Bonn), to Prof. Pier Andrea Borea of the University of Ferrara, Italy and to Prof. Herbert Zimmermann of the University of Frankfurt, Germany (delivered to both of them on the occasion of the Joint German-Italian Purine Club meeting held in September 2013 in Rimini), and to Prof. Flaminio Cattabeni (delivered to him in person on the occasion of the Congresso della Società Italiana di Farmacologia held in October 2015 in Naples).
