An ongoing dialogue on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases,
April 11th, 2025
Looking Back at a Defunct ID Meeting — and Ahead to a Thriving One
Ugly branded mug from an ICAAC meeting. Who would use this?
Back in prehistoric times, many ID doctors and microbiologists would gather each fall at a meeting to review the latest antimicrobial clinical trials and promising “bug-drug” studies of novel compounds in development. The meeting was called the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, abbreviated ICAAC.
There were a bunch of problems with ICAAC. First, everyone associates “chemotherapy” with cancer treatment, which of course this wasn’t. Second, the abbreviation (spoken “ick-kack”) sounded a lot like the emesis-inducing medication that once was used in emergency departments for poisonings. Third, it was often scheduled within weeks or days of the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, or IDSA — or even jointly, creating a (very long) meeting, leaving everyone scrambling for espresso and searching for earlier flights home.
That it took place in the busy fall months, sandwiched between school starting and the holiday season, didn’t help.
Add to that the fact that ICAAC lacked a coherent identity. Was it a microbiology meeting? A clinical conference? A showcase for biotech and pharma, where investigators tried to sound convincingly enthusiastic about new drugs despite modest MIC reductions or a dubious noninferiority design? It was all of these things, and sometimes none of them.
In ICAAC’s giant exhibit hall, packed with displays from pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, meeting attendees would receive “free” swag of sometimes comically useless items. Who wants to go to the supermarket with shopping bags emblazoned with the brand name of the latest fluoroquinolone, or a novel therapy trumpeting treatment success in “life threatening sepsis”? One of my friends would return home each year with what he considered the ugliest coffee mug of the conference; I believe the teicoplanin mugs frequently won the contest, perhaps a foreshadowing of the fact that the drug would never become commercially available in the United States.
Over time, the problems with ICAAC compounded. Attendance dwindled. And eventually, in an effort to rebrand and perhaps escape the shadow of its onomatopoeic curse, ICAAC was absorbed into a broader meeting: ASM Microbe, which takes place in June.
(Remarkably, another conference — the International Conference on Autoclaved Aerated Concrete, of all things — has since picked up the ICAAC acronym. Bold move.)
The annual IDSA meeting, now rebranded as IDWeek, took up some of the clinical trials slack when ICAAC stopped in 2015, but it’s never really hit its stride as a place to highlight breaking research. It’s more a meeting for state-of-the art reviews by experts in the field, and for catching up with former colleagues and co-fellows.
Today, the best meeting for practice-changing ID clinical trials has become the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) Global, which just to be confusing, was until 2024 called the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, or ECCMID. Every time someone says “ESCMID,” I still have to pause and translate back to “Oh right, ECCMID.”
For years now, many of the real practice-changing research studies in ID debuted at ECCMID (now ESCMID), and I have no doubt that this week’s meeting (which started today) will be similar. I’m not attending, but will be monitoring content from afar on Bluesky and whatever that other site is called that used to be so useful. Ironically, it was research studies presented at ECCMID that first clued me in to the power of social media for disseminating research, as even from my office here in Boston I could track the most important meeting content. For the record, it was the OVIVA study. Kind of a big deal.
So long live ESCMID, but here’s to ICAAC. May its memory live on, somewhere in the collective ID conscience, perhaps as an ugly teichoplanin mug — and may we all remember: if your acronym sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball, it might be time to rethink branding.
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Paul E. Sax, MD
Contributing Editor
NEJM Journal Watch
Infectious Diseases
Biography | Disclosures | Summaries
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I still have some trovafloxacin-branded items from an ICAAC in the 1990s. Embarrassed to admit that!