European Working Party on systemic lupus erythematosus and European Forum on Antiphospholipid Antibodies: two networks promoting European research on autoimmunity.

摘要

This special issue of Lupus is devoted to highlight the main achievements of two European networks that were created in the 1990s to promote collaborative research on systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). At that time, two decades ago and when mobile cellular phones, Internet, e-mails and low-cost airlines did not then exist or were extremely primitive, several audacious medical researchers, most of them under the umbrella of Graham Hughes, decided to join their efforts using express postal mails, fax machines and expensive so-called 'long-distance' phone calls in order to create 'networks', a concept not as popular as it is today.