For the second year running, the International Academy of Ceramic Implantology (IAOCI) hosted its annual Congress under extremely challenging and difficult circumstances. Held from 19 to 21 August 2021, the event was also a milestone as the academy celebrated its 10th Anniversary. This year the theme was “Ceramic Implantology: Past, Present and Future”.
As you can imagine with all the travel and logistical challenges imposed on us by COVID-19, the congresses’ physical footprint was scaled down and we had to be creative by adaptively converting the event into a hybrid format where we had both virtual and in-presence attendees and speakers. It turned out to be very successful not only because of the content of the programme, the outstanding logistics, and the will of so many dentists to attend in person, but also thanks to the virtual attendees, who in some cases were in 10 to 15-hour time difference zones, and who found a way and the time to participate virtually. Once again, we reached our goal to provide a programme that was informative, well sequenced with a good balance of scientific content as well as clinical experiences from our speakers. This year we returned with the poster presentation competition. We accepted five finalists one of which was virtual and another with an industrial background. We awarded the top three presenters cash prizes for their presentations. We were also honoured and privileged to have two new players in the ceramic dental implant industry, namely Patent™ Dental Implant System from Switzerland and MAAB’S Z7 implants from Argentina, choose our event to introduce their systems to the North America market during our congress.
We want to extend many thanks to all the attendees and speakers, both in-person and virtual, for allowing our 10th Anniversary Annual Congress to be unique and successful. We also want to thank all the exhibitors and sponsors who—despite the circumstances—came from far and near to participate in and celebrate this milestone. As we look ahead to our 11th Anniversary Congress which is going to take place in Washington DC in the spring of 2022, we have once again already gathered a fantastic line-up of speakers and scientists to come and share their experiences with us. The list and provisional programme are going to be posted on our website (www.iaoci.com/iaoci2022) in the upcoming weeks and on an ongoing basis. Given the success of the poster presentations, we will continue to host the poster competition and accept both virtual and in-person entries.
The IAOCI intends to continue to host both in-person and virtual educational events on ceramic implants and implant-related topics across North and South America and other parts of the world. We invite you to visit our new website www.iaoci.com/events to see more information on our upcoming events and how you can be a member and part of our organisation.