Sources of funding and Declaration of interest

Submitted by floX on Fri, 05/13/2011 - 10:45

Current travel grant funds have been donated from the following organisations:

  • Glaxo Smithkline
  • Sanofi Pasteur
  • Gulbenkian foundation http://www.gulbenkian.pt/
  • Massimiliano di Renzi foundation
  • Anders Gustav foundation

None of the above organisations have specified any conditions for the disbursal of grants, beyond the country affiliation to Portugal for the Gulbenkian foundation noted above.
The ESCAIDE 2011 Scientific Committee noted EANs request to formally consider any potential conflict of interest regarding the use of money from Pharmaceutical companies for travel grants to support attendance. The Committee noted that abstract selection will be made purely on the basis of scientific quality, the peer review is performed anonymously, in advance, and independently from the assignment of grants. Travel grants will be awarded only after the authors had been notified of the decision to accept an abstract in the conference. Therefore the Committee agrees that potential for selection bias towards authors who may attend ESCAIDE using grants offered by EAN does not subsist.

However, in order to ensure transparency and to avoid any conflict of interest, all applicants must declare any conflict of interest relating to their presented work and the above organisations (excepting the Massimiliano di Renzi foundation which is a family donation).