good morning to Bangkok we are very happy to see so many people here at this v i6 symposium on poultry intestinal health we have quite a lot of people we have about 550 to 600 seats here and as you can see we are will be with almost 500 people here which is quite a lot so I basically will give you a short opening just explaining a bit what I see is and why we have organized this intestinal health conference in chickens so as I just said we are with quite a number of people and just talking about numbers I put some numbers here behind me on the screen and I will not tell you what it is for the moment I will explain these numbers in a few slides they will come up again just to make sure you will listen to me if you know what it means you will have to listen to me for 10 minutes okay so just a background for people that not really know what what I see is in fact we were we started in 2010 just a group of people sitting together a group of veterinarians consultants and also people from university scientists that sat together and just had a discussion on how we could stimulate networking how we could stimulate discussions between people from the field practitioners government people scientists veterinarians consultants and the industry of course and at that moment we decided to try at least to promote well scientific work on intestinal health in poultry to the global poultry industry and that's why we have been starting these conferences which we are now organizing since 2012 almost annually just very briefly why do we focus on intestinal health of course because it's very important and actually I have listed three different reasons here first of all of course because intestinal health or everything that happens in the intestine is really a key driver for animal health in general but also for animal welfare and definitely also for animal performance and what you see here is just a statement of hippocrates already 400 years before Christ he said that all disease begins in the gut which is actually to some extent true also he knew already that many diseases and even diseases that were not intestinal of nature well at least had some could be influenced by for example food so that's already a statement that was very prophetically because now it seems to be true really that many diseases even extra intestinal diseases are also have a intestinal component just to give you some examples of course well they are quite some intestinal diseases here's some pictures of necrotic enteritis left on top and coccidiosis of course intestinal diseases but also animal welfare wet litter dermatitis these are all different aspects that are related to something that starts in the intestine okay diarrhea food safety is quite an important issue also here of course salmonella Campylobacter is increasing so also these are pathogens that are intestinal pathogens and also solutions that are targeting intestinal health are also affecting colonization with these pathogens and also well you have some intestinal diseases I just listed the example of lameness these are also bacteria that translocates from the intestine to the systemic route to systemic organs just well for me of course as a scientists it's it's a very interesting very fascinating research topic what you see here it's just a nice graph I I use just to illustrate you that the intestinal ecosystem is something very special we have quite a lot of cells there in the gut you have a lot of immune cells a lot of epithelial cells and there's a huge interaction between all the bacteria sitting in the gut and the cells of the host so it's a very fascinating research topic because these bacteria produce a lot of different metabolites host cells are sensing the metabolized by these bacteria so it's it's very complex but it's very interesting to study and as you can see here there is always light at the end of the tunnel so this is clearly the colon so okay just some questions iff put up on a slide here just to just give you some questions that maybe we'll have an answer at the end of this conference but like it will not be because it's as I said it's it's very complex we even don't know what beneficial microbes are you know some of it but definitely not all of it we even don't know what is a beneficial host response what should an animal do in the gut how should it to react to the bacteria to make sure it's well it's good for animal performance of animal health that quite a lot of sub questions that are just listed here just an illustration of complex questions we need an answer to and that's why of course we need a lot of research that is still going on both in the industry and both at universities just the first number here this if the number of bacteria per gram of intestinal contents okay just to give you an illustration of how much bacteria are present in the gut and that means that well we're only able to culture some of them really a minority and we don't know what all the other bacteria are doing so just to give you an idea on the complexity of the intestinal microbial composition it's really amazing that you have so many different bacteria for one gram of intestinal contents we don't know even about ninety percent of these bacteria are doing so it's quite quite fascinating to me what you see here on the screen is the number of scientific papers on chicken intestinal health published in international journals and you see this quite and steep increase the last decade meaning that well the topic of intestinal health in chickens is really an emerging topic many people started working on that many universities and while this has been starting in groups in Europe United States you also now have a lot of research in Asia South America everywhere in the world and a lot of new papers coming up so and this is also well reflected a bit when we have quite a lot of new technologies that we can use to study what is going on intestinal ecosystem and these technology is their various one once of course there's the genomics there's the proteomics the metabolomics and even then when you have this wealth of data coming in for example lists of all metabolites produced in the gut list of all proteins produced in by gut bacteria still studying what all these metabolites are proteins are doing is still about something very complex and still something that scientists are struggling with so again just showing how complex this topic of intestinal health really is this number here you see on the left this well I can't even even even read it I don't know how to pronounce that at least but this is the number of base pairs that people can sequence now in one day the number of base pairs DNA that people can sequence in one day when I started as a scientist in 99 this was about 100,000 in one day now there's a huge number which I don't even pronounce and this one here this is the number of dollars to sequence 1 million base pairs when I started 20 years ago this was 100 thousand dollars just to show you that all these technologies became much cheaper and we get a lot of data from all these new emerging technologies but the key question is of course how to interpret all these data and we will hear some speakers today that will give a little bit more information on how to do this the third reason of course is that while the intestinal health topic is also a key driver for innovation because we of course are all many people of you are developing the traditional strategies feed additives to really solve problems in the intestine of animals not only of poultry but probably also of other animal species and again this is a statement of Hippocrates that said that well let's food be the medicines are also already he knew more than 2,000 years ago that's well by eating certain foods certain foodstuffs that you can at least affect health in general human health in that case so again while we have many companies your present that of course developing feed additives maybe also developing Diagnostics for cattle which is also main new research topic I think how to develop criteria for gut health these are all things we will speak about today in this conference so just give you a little bit of thank to all the sponsors because also they are of course driving innovation this is just a list of all the platinum diamonds and gold sponsors and also the silver and bronze sponsors I will mention them again at the end of the conference but I'd already wanted to put these slides up to thank these people because they are also of course driving the innovation doing a lot of research developing new solutions for intestinal health just some small practical details this is probably you will not know what actually is meant by this slide this location here is the Royal Bangkok Sports Club this is a picture of 1911 and well as you know I'm from Belgium also Martin is from Belgium people had organized this conference also this guy here is a Belgian guy this is Charlotte found important and in fact this well airplane here it's called Wanda and in 1911 this this guy was the first that actually carried out flight in Thailand and he started he departed any land that's here behind at this grass field so this was the first airport in Thailand and this Belgian guy was the first one that actually carried out the flight he just landed here at the cross so ok just a mystical background you know that now it's completely different this is a very exclusive Sport Club now it's a Polo Club with a swimming pool Golf Course horse racing etc so it's completely different just a little bit of history this is an important slide I think we had five conferences in total for the moment well it's not a conference it's just a bunch of people sitting together around the table this is the start of IC but actually this is the number of attendants and as you can see there is also quite an exponential increase in the number of during the last five conferences and it's really quite remarkable because at the moment we organized the confidence last year in San Paulo while I really believed you reached the top 340 people I thought well also for my nerves that was quite enough but now today we have 473 people that are inscribed and are attending the conference so it's really great also the location is it was important because you had a lot of people are also quite interested in this topic you don't know what it will be next time maybe we go up again we'll see it will depend on many different things so but this is great we have about 35 different nationalities here today a lot of people from the whole South and East generation going from New Zealand Australia overall the southern Asian countries Japan China and of course all this region we have almost people from almost all European countries also United States and some people from the African countries and middle and South America so it's really very international with 35 different nationalities you have the program in your booklet we have 95 speakers we got a lot of submissions we have chosen 26 short communications and I should have seen tomorrow we have a roundtable discussion that will be based on the inputs we get from the audience I will give you an explanation or a few minutes we have created an app that you can download through the Wi-Fi network here and over in which you can just put questions I will just explain that in a few minutes but very important of course it's the last point here we are of course also here to network to just discuss things and to just exchange ideas that's the most important thing I think most important reason why we organize this kind of conferences some housekeeping rules please turn off your cell phone actually I didn't do it myself you have to do that in a minute also be aware that this is what this is rapid private characters so the conference zones or the the ground floor it's called first floor here this zone also the lobby and at the second floor there is a poster session so we also allow to take the elevator to the second floor and in fact the second floor is very nice you have a flew all over the outside area there so it's a really nice place I guess yeah you will see during the coffee breaks here this room here on the ground floor and also the second floor which is it's not the second floor is a third floor in the elevator okay for me its second floor but it's a dirt floor if you push in the elevator you can find Wi-Fi here everybody should be able to connect to the Wi-Fi it's I think if you go to the network's to the Wi-Fi networks it's called or BSC free network or something like that and you just have to login with your ID card number and your email address and then if you just log in you get connected there was an app created thanks to Pierre Andre and this is you can if you go to well you can download the app if you just go to the Play Store or the App Store and the name of the app is just AIESEC in capitals okay you will see if you download it you will get this this screen here which you can click on the program the speakers but also there's one link that says vote and there we can just put questions you just click a presentation and you can add questions there and I will have all the questions here on my laptop on the smartphone and I will be able to pick some questions maybe for the discussions after the talks or maybe for the discussions during the roundtable discussions this is the final number and this number is why I will not tell you what it is I will tell you tomorrow okay just to be able to make sure that you stay here if you want to know what actually that number means okay so have a great conference thank you for being here it's a huge audience we are very happy with that and especially enjoy the great scientific discussions we will have here at this conference so thank you [Music]