Lessons From Tokyo's Canceled 2020 Perinatal Congress

In April 2020, the Federation of Asian and Oceania Perinatal Societies pulled the plug on what would have been the biggest gathering of perinatal researchers in the Asia-Pacific region. The 21st FAOPS congress, scheduled for Tokyo and linked with the PREBIC AA workshop, fell victim to international border closures and the early scramble for hospital resources. For clinicians from Sydney, Auckland, Manila, and Seoul, the cancellation was more than an inconvenience. It cut off a meeting place where preterm birth cohorts were compared, placental pathology was debated over strong coffee, and where young Australian fellows usually met the editors who would later review their first papers.

What survives of that lost week is now reshaping how the region's perinatal community thinks about collaboration. The cancelled Tokyo programme has become an accidental blueprint. Researchers who would have flown to Shibuya have instead built distributed networks, shared datasets across time zones, and trialled virtual abstract platforms that a Sydney registrar can join between ward rounds at Westmead. The lessons reach well beyond conference logistics, touching on how pregnancy research is prioritised, funded, and translated into care for mothers in places as varied as western Sydney, rural Western Australia, and the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

What the Cancellation Exposed About Asia-Pacific Collaboration

The Tokyo programme had been designed around the rhythm of a face-to-face meeting: poster walks in the morning, plenary updates on corticosteroid timing in the afternoon, and informal corridor conversations that often produced the next multi-centre trial. Once that rhythm broke, the field discovered how dependent it had become on the physical gathering. Data sharing committees, which had assumed an annual check-in, stalled. Several pregnancy biobanks that had planned sample handoffs in Tokyo's hotel ballrooms had to ship frozen aliquots via specialised couriers instead, adding weeks to projects that feed into preterm birth prediction models.

Australian researchers felt this acutely. Those at the University of Melbourne and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute had been preparing joint symposia with colleagues from the National University of Singapore and the University of Tokyo on neurodevelopment of uncomplicated pregnancies. Without the congress, early-career fellows lost the chance to present posters that often lead to international postdoctoral positions. Some Australian labs responded by hosting smaller hybrid events in Melbourne and Brisbane, redirecting registrations through the official congress portal where the original programme abstracts remain archived.

The disruption also exposed a quieter truth. Researchers in lower-resource settings across Oceania, including those working in Pacific Island nations, often depended on the FAOPS travel grant scheme to attend in person. When flights stopped, so did their visibility. The cancelled meeting therefore widened an existing gap between well-funded metropolitan teams and the smaller perinatal units in places like Honiara, Port Moresby, and outer regional Australia.

Rebuilding Collaboration Through Distributed Networks

In place of the lost congress, a patchwork of regional working groups has emerged. The PREBIC clinical trials network, which had planned to launch a new preterm birth prevention study at the Tokyo meeting, reconvened virtually six months later and enrolled its first participants through sites in Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo simultaneously. Australian investigators at the Royal Hospital for Women in Randwick adapted the protocol so that antenatal visits could be combined with routine blood draws, easing the burden on women travelling long distances from the Illawarra or the Southern Highlands.

This kind of redistribution suits Australian clinical reality. Expectant mothers in remote areas of the Northern Territory or far-west New South Wales routinely drive hundreds of kilometres to reach a tertiary centre, and any protocol that relies on extra visits is unlikely to recruit well. Researchers have leaned into home blood-pressure monitoring, telehealth lactation consults, and mobile apps designed by teams in Perth and Adelaide. The work is unglamorous but essential, and it reflects the same decentralised mindset that now drives pregnancy research across the continent.

Funding bodies have followed. The National Health and Medical Research Council has signalled continued interest in multi-jurisdictional perinatal trials, particularly those that link Australian sites with partners in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan. Open-access datasets hosted at institutions such as the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth now feed directly into modelling work once reserved for in-person workshops, ensuring that the science keeps moving even when delegates cannot meet under one roof.

Translation From Bench to Bedside in Diverse Populations

One of the strongest themes of the cancelled Tokyo programme was nutritional science in pregnancy. The congress had planned a dedicated session on the role of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in fetal neurodevelopment, drawing on Australian cohort data from the BARCO study and Japanese work from the Hamamatsu birth cohort. Although the session never took place, the science has continued to surface in published papers and virtual grand rounds, including a detailed overview of omega-3 in pregnancy that has been widely shared among Australian dietitians.

Translational work of this kind matters because Australian women receive pregnancy nutrition advice from a confusing mix of sources. Medicare-funded GP visits cover the basics, but detailed counselling on omega-3 supplementation or iodine intake often falls to private dietitians, whose recommendations are not always consistent across the country. Researchers at Flinders University and the University of Queensland have begun cross-checking their supplement findings against dietary intake data from multicultural cohorts, recognising that women from Vietnamese, Mandarin, or Arabic-speaking backgrounds may have different baseline intakes of seafood and iodised salt than the broader Australian population.

This diversity lens has reshaped mental health translation too. The cancelled programme had included a symposium on screening for perinatal mood disorders, with planned talks on adapting the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers. That work has since migrated into a series of papers and a current implementation study in several Queensland health services, with cross-validation against depression screening tools used in refugee and migrant cohorts.

Voices From the Asia-Pacific Region

Conversations that would have happened in Tokyo now unfold on shared documents, video calls, and the occasional face-to-face satellite meeting. A mid-career obstetrician from the Philippines who would have presented her preterm birth cohort data at FAOPS 2020 instead presented it at a satellite meeting in Cebu in late 2022, funded jointly by Australian and Japanese society grants. Colleagues from the Australian and New Zealand Neonatal Network joined remotely from Auckland, and the discussion ran well past the scheduled end because everyone wanted to compare follow-up protocols.

Australian researchers describe the new arrangements as more democratic but also more exhausting. The convenience of a single intensive week in Tokyo has been replaced by a stream of shorter meetings spread across the calendar. On the upside, more nurses, midwives, and Aboriginal health practitioners can attend without leaving their communities. The Perth-based Ngangk Yira Institute for Aboriginal Mothers and Babies, for instance, was able to send two researchers to a regional perinatal outcomes workshop held in Adelaide in early 2023, because the trip did not require a fortnight away from family.

The shift is also changing who sets the agenda. Smaller Pacific and Southeast Asian centres, which once struggled to be heard above the metropolitan giants, now contribute through working papers and shared slide decks that circulate for comment ahead of meetings. The result is a more pluralistic conversation about stillbirth prevention, newborn screening, and the design of respectful maternity care, one that better reflects the linguistic and cultural diversity of mothers from across the region.

Sustaining Collaboration Beyond the Pandemic

Looking ahead, the perinatal research ecosystem that emerged from the wreckage of the 2020 cancellation looks structurally different from the one that planned the Tokyo congress. Hybrid formats are now standard, abstract submission portals stay open year-round, and satellite workshops have become the connective tissue between larger society meetings. Australian institutions have invested in research midwives and data managers rather than relying solely on conference travel budgets, recognising that the day-to-day work of recruitment and follow-up is where trials succeed or fail.

There are still gaps. Funding cycles have not always caught up with the new rhythm, and several Australian fellows have reported that virtual networking produces fewer of the spontaneous collaborations that defined the pre-pandemic congress circuit. The lessons from Tokyo are now embedded in training programmes, with new PhD candidates at the University of Sydney and Monash learning to design trials that can recruit across borders without assuming everyone will fly to a single venue.

For clinicians and researchers who lived through the 2020 cancellation, the message is clear. The next shock to international meetings may come from a different cause, but the response can be more graceful. A side-by-side look at the old and new approaches highlights the trade-offs.

The legacy of the cancelled Tokyo meeting is therefore not only one of loss. It is also a story of adaptation, distributed leadership, and a more inclusive approach to the science of pregnancy and the newborn across the Asia-Pacific region.

Readers who want to revisit the original programme abstracts, society announcements, and travel information from the cancelled meeting can explore the FAOPS 2020 platform directly, where archived material remains available for early-career researchers and clinicians planning the next collaborative step.