It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 8th Dubai International Conference for Medical Sciences to Dubai, including the winners, the invited speakers and guests. This is right time to be together the winners of the award and the distinguished speakers and they will meet the doctors and medical students in the workshop/meet the expert session on the first day of the programme. I believe that this will prove to be of immense value in facilitating discussion and debate on the very complex scientific information presented by the world experts. I congratulate the scientific committee of the 8th Dubai International Conference for Medical Sciences for selecting the world known pioneers from the drugs & pharmaceutical field who have discovered many drugs and have led to assuage the suffering of millions of patients worldwide.

I would like to express great appreciation to His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, the patron of the Awards, for his support and encouragement, for the articulation of the vision of the development of the country, and for his continual emphasis on the importance of excellence in the successful development of human resources in the United Arab Emirates. I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of and express my appreciation to all members of the Board of Trustees of the Awards and its various committees and subcommittees for their efforts.

This conference will be an excellent forum to discuss the recent developments in Vaccine development, new drugs and also the volunteers who have made a wonderful job in many parts of the world will speak about their works.

I am sure that you will be benefited immensely from the speeches being presented. I am confident that the strategy adopted in bringing top quality expertise together in this place will give an excellent contribution to improved quality of health. I would like to thank the speakers once again very much for accepting our invitation to participate in this conference and to have traveled to Dubai from distant places; I wish you all well with your future research endeavours.

I wish all of you a very pleasant stay in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

On behalf of the General Secretariat, I welcome you all to Dubai and to the 8th Dubai International Conference for Medical Sciences.

Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Award for Medical Sciences is organizing this conference at its 8th term since 1999-2000 and have presented fruitful lectures in the past conferences from different fields of medicine. In this term of 2013-2014 we have another team of brilliant scientists, who are pioneers from the selected fields of Drug Discovery, Vaccines development, Cell Therapy and Targeted Therapy.

In this conference you will find other equally prominent scientists from the fields will be presenting their work in the scientific sessions along with the winners. I am sure that the scientific sessions promise to be enlightening and state-of the-art. I am also inviting you to the exhibition hall where you will find the difference from what you have observed in the last conferences. Once again, we are very proud to say that the Award’s international reputation has reached one more step ahead with its success. In this time you will be receiving a copy of the Proceedings of the Conference which is a supplement of the Hamdan Medical Journal which has unique features.

I also take this opportunity to thank the team of members from the scientific committee who have identified the most deserving candidates to receive the awards and also the members of the other committees who have contributed to make this event a grand success.

I wish you all will have a nice time in Dubai and also in the conference sessions.

It is a great pleasure and privilege to invite you to attend the 8th biannual Conference of Sheikh Hamdan Awards for Medical Sciences, to be held in Dubai, UAE, on December 15-17, 2014. The Award has grown significantly, and we are happy to invite not only clinicians but also basic scientists, nurses, dieticians as well as psychologists, social workers and others involved in the care of patients from all parts of the world.

The Awards' scientific meeting has always been an exciting, special and memorable biannual event. The concept of the programme will be the same as in previous conferences with talks from winners of the various categories of the Awards and from an elite panel of speakers from around the world. We will have plenary sessions, poster sessions, and workshops addressing the cutting edge science of medicine. The structure of the programme will also offer ample opportunities to discuss specific issues with the experts.

The theme of the 2014 meeting will be Drug Discovery, indicating our ambition to cover important themes in all our biannual conferences. The pace of discovery and our knowledge of biology and treatment has increased dramatically but many challenges remain, particularly in translating these advances to clinical care. This meeting is expected to provide a unique opportunity to showcase the latest innovations in drug discovery thus providing an enlightened look into the future trend of therapeutic planning in patients.

We intend to offer you an exceptional meeting with its outstanding scientific quality and great networking opportunities.

We look forward to welcoming you to Dubai 2014.