Outstanding Questions in Transplantation: Our Patients Need Your Input

Since the early years when transplantation was viewed as an experimental procedure, the field has made significant advances. However, as we all know, there is still considerable progress required to improve the lives of our patients. To overcome challenges in transplantation, it is important to collaborate amongst our broad range of expertise in the field. In addition to AST's Communities of Practice, there is now an exciting new way to share your ideas.

I am happy to announce that the AST, in collaboration with its Community of Basic Scientists and Trainee & Young Faculty COP, has launched a brand new online community open to all AST members – “The Outstanding Questions in Transplantation."

To provide an overview of this new initiative, I have invited the community chair, Jamil Azzi, to write a guest blog post.

Outstanding Questions in Transplantation: Our Patients Need Your Input

Organ transplantation remains one of the most important advances in modern medicine that highlights the extraordinary achievements of many pioneers in addition to the outstanding courage and generosity of organ donors and recipients who continue to inspire us all.

We, as transplant professionals, have the honor and the privilege of being part of this extraordinary journey and witness this miracle of life almost every day. However, we also continue to witness the tremendous challenges that our patients face.  This gives us the utmost responsibility to work together and focus our efforts on identifying and addressing the most pressing unanswered questions in transplantation.

We are launching today a new online community, “The Outstanding Questions in Transplantation”, in collaboration with the Community of Basic Scientists, the Trainee & Young Faculty COP, and other communities of practice within the AST. We are hoping that this platform allows clinicians, and scientists to meet and exchange ideas about the outstanding questions in transplantation.

We invite all members of the American Society of Transplantation to actively participate and to share their ideas about the future directions of the transplantation field by logging in here: Outstanding Questions in Transplantation. All AST members will automatically be subscribed to this community and we will be sending a once a day digest email to all our members to update you on the ongoing discussion.

We are encouraging the clinicians in our community to share the most pressing unmet clinical challenges in their daily practice for the scientists to focus on and formulate scientific questions needing to be addressed over the coming few years.

Finally, we will summarize this year-long discussion in a white paper to be used as a reference to guide our ongoing efforts over the coming years in achieving our common goal of bettering patients’ outcome.

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Jamil Azzi MD is a transplant immunologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Azzi’s laboratory is located at the Transplantation Research Center and focuses on the basic and translational sciences of transplant immunobiology. Dr. Azzi is also a kidney transplant physician with active clinical and teaching roles. He is the director of the kidney transplant fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.