The 120th anniversary of the foundation of the Institut Pasteur will take place in 2008. One of the events to highlight this celebration will be the 7th Louis Pasteur Conference on Infectious Diseases. This two-day conference will gather the world’s best experts in the fields of epidemiology, public health, microbiology and immunology. The major goals of the Conference will be to present cutting-edge concepts and methodologies and discuss how they might increase our ability to monitor emerging infectious diseases, model and control epidemics, understand pathogenesis at the molecular and cellular levels, discover new drugs, dissect the host immunity, and generate new vaccines. The Conference will consist of four sessions, each opening with a historical perspective presenting past achievements and how basic research has been able to eliminate critical ‘roadblocks’, and closing with a talk stressing the remaining challenges in controlling infectious diseases.