The first European union network of excellence for gastric cancer conference, Rome, Italy, April 2008

In April 2008 the European Union Network of Excellence (EUNE) for Gastric Cancer held an international symposium in Rome. There were more than 300 delegates from 14 countries. The program was deliberately designed to allow as much discussion as possible. There was a series of state-of-the-art presentations with an emphasis on highlighting the areas of controversy. In addition there were presentations on current topics under development. A theme throughout was the need to standardize the approach to gastric cancer diagnosis, management, and treatment in order to facilitate close links between the clinic and the basic science laboratory. There were five main topics: early cancer, treatment of locally advanced gastric cancer, esophago-gastric junctional cancer, multimodal therapy, and quality of life. Each session was summarized by moderators and at the end of the meeting topics were identifi ed for subsequent collaborative work. This report describes the proceedings of the meeting and is based on the presentations given by the faculty members