IPTA PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Dear IPTA members, colleagues and friends,

The Executive Committee, the Council and the IPTA committees are pleased to provide you with the second Newsletter this year for an update of our Association's activities. We will give you a comprehensive update on the projects and initiatives of the Education Committee, Infectious Disease Committee, Publication Committee, and the newly founded Ethics Committee. We are delighted that 24 IPTA members recently volunteered for collaboration in these committees! It is a good way to involve the membership and to increase the interaction with the transplant community.

The upcoming 26th International Congress of the Transplantation Society (TTS) will be held in Hong Kong from August 18-23, 2016. There will be various IPTA activities during the congress such as an IPTA/TTS Pediatric Post Graduate Course on August 19, 2016 focusing on two major topics: “Listing children for solid organ transplantation and donor selection” and “Specific aspects of post-transplant care in children” and two scientific sessions organized by IPTA. Hopefully you will have the chance to join this important congress with our mother society TTS. Please stop by for a chat; all of your suggestions are welcome. Have a great summer!

Yours sincerely,

Burkhard Tönshoff
IPTA President

IPTA 2017: A CONGRESS OF COLLABORATIONS!

EIGHT MONTHS TO GO … and it will go by so quickly! Program planning is well underway and we are thrilled with the response and enthusiasm of our invited speakers! Look for a preliminary program to be online later in 2016.

Collaboration is an important part of the IPTA 2017 Congress. On the springboard of our partnership with TTS, we have actively pursued opportunities to partner with other transplant organizations. It is important that we all work together as a community to advance the science and practice of transplant medicine, especially the pediatric component through IPTA. The Barcelona Congress will showcase collaborative sessions between IPTA and the following organizations:

We are very excited about the opportunity to work together with these international transplant societies and believe that this will be the beginning of future partnerships allowing us to advance pediatric offerings moving forward. We continue to work with other organizations and hope to add to this list over the next few months.

Every society is as strong as its members, and the same can be said for IPTA. You will soon receive requests for nominations for the IPTA biennial awards. We look forward to your nominations of your colleagues around the world so that we can honor them for their dedication to pediatric transplantation. This year we will also announce the first IPTA Pioneer in Transplantation lecture and award to a well deserving pioneer in our field.

As you plan your trip to IPTA 2017, here is a recap of other things to look forward to: a vibrant Opening Ceremony on Saturday May 26th; scientific sessions that will include world renowned plenary and state-of-the art speakers; and the very popular parallel interactive workshop sessions with experts in the field. Experience the history of medicine in Spain at the Hospital San Pau during the congress social evening on Monday May 28th.

PEDIATRIC ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION SUMMER SCHOOL
ZAVIDOVO, RUSSIA

The IPTA Executive Committee and two former presidents of IPTA, Drs. Richard Fine and Richard Trompeter, had the opportunity to participate in the recent Pediatric Organ Transplantation Summer School, organized by Drs. Michael Kaabak and Nadeen Babenko of the Petrovsky Research Center of Surgery in Moscow. Two days of in depth discussions covering all aspects of pediatric kidney, heart and liver transplantation were presented to an audience of some 150 pediatric transplant specialists, mostly nephrologists and surgeons from all over Russia. The venue was near Tver, an hour north of Moscow. The talks were well received, with questions and discussion from the audience and among the speakers.

he pediatric kidney transplant program in Russia is the largest pediatric kidney transplant program in Russia, and performs some 30 transplants in children annually; it is the only program in Russia transplanting kidneys into small children under 5 years of age.

Ron Shapiro, Anne Dipchand, Mignon McCulloch and Burkhard Tönshoff

EDUCATION COMMITTEE UPDATE

Chair: Christian Benden, Switzerland
Incoming Chair: Rohit Kohli, OH, USA

The Education Committee, an international group of pediatric transplant physicians/surgeons and allied health professionals, is responsible for expanding IPTA's educational activities. In 2016, the Education Committee has continued to expand the Society’s educational activities co-organizing the biennial IPTA Fellows Symposium on Pediatric Transplantation that took place at Mount Sinai in New York City in April this year with 30 fellows from around the world and an international faculty of experts in the field of pediatric transplantation. The IPTA Fellows Symposium provided updates in a broad spectrum of pediatric transplantation, but furthermore, an ideal environment for networking and mentoring. Once again the IPTA Fellows Symposium proved to be very popular amongst trainees, one of them stating that “… the whole meeting was phenomenal and it really helps give "newbies" like us perspective and help in trying to make our mark in the field…”

The Education Committee successfully submitted symposium proposals for the American Transplant Congress in May in Boston, MA, USA, and contributed to the educational content of a Joint IPTA/TTS Pediatric Post Graduate Course at the 26th International Congress of The Transplantation Society in August 2016 in Hong Kong. The Pediatric PG Course reviews listing criteria for children undergoing solid organ transplantation and donor selection, and provides insights on specific aspects of post-transplant care in children.

In the meantime, the Education Committee has already started to organize the educational content of the PG Course planned at the start of the upcoming 9th IPTA Congress to be held in Barcelona, Spain, in May 2017.

ID CARE COMMITTEE UPDATE

Upton Allen, ID CARE Committee Chair

The ID-CARE initiative was formed within IPTA with the idea that one of its main goals would be to serve as the focal point for ID initiatives and to link IPTA with other ID groups where appropriate. The focus is ID Clinical Care, Advocacy, Research and Education. The Committee seeks to engage IPTA members from all disciplines within pediatric organ stem cell transplantation.

The ID CARE Committee has been involved in several initiatives, some of which have been published in Pediatric Transplantation (Curriculum-related documents). In keeping with this approach, the group is currently working on a document that focuses on the evaluation and management of transplant candidates or recipients with recent active infections. A first draft of this document has been completed and submission to Pediatric Transplantation is expected in Fall 2016. The leads are Arnaud L’Huillier, Upton Allen and Michael Green.

The group has also identified other projects which are at varying stages of completion. Among these are the following:

1. Status of use of live vaccines after pediatric solid organ. Klara Pofsay-Barbe is leading this initiative. In addition, a survey of current practices has been proposed.
2. Pneumocystis prophylaxis strategies across transplant centers. This is being led by Mignon McCulloch and Marian Michaels.
3. TB and Transplantation: A Pediatric Perspective. This initiative is led by Mignon McCulloch.
4. Yearly Influenza update. This has been proposed as the first in the series of yearly influenza updates be led by Natasha Halasa. This will focus on what is new in influenza molecular epidemiology, antiviral drug resistance, vaccines, treatment and chemoprophylaxis with a focus on immunocompromised patients, notably transplant patients.

Over the upcoming months, the group looks forward to engaging representation from the HSCT group. Collaborations on selected documents or guidelines will also occur. These included, but are not limited to cytomegalovirus (CMV) or Post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder (PTLD).

PEDIATRIC TRANSPLANTATION UPDATE

Wiley, publisher of Pediatric Transplantation has announced the acquisition of Atypon, one of the world’s leading scientific and scholarly information platform providers.

Wiley is very excited about joining up with our new colleagues at Atypon to bring you the best publishing technology in the industry. Atypon shares our values and focus on the researcher, and working with them is a natural extension of our commitment to providing flexibility to our partners and increasing digital engagement for readers.

Over the next 18 months, we’ll migrate from the platform supporting the Wiley Online Library to Atypon’s Literatum platform. This will bring a number of new benefits to users, including seamless access to content through authenticated article links, improved single-sign-on, editor highlights, article usage metrics, site-wide fully responsive mobile design, minimal-downtime releases, targeted content marketing, article recommendations and e-mail alerting, and more powerful search. This approach will allow us to more rapidly and flexibly respond to the changing needs of the communities we serve.

Wiley will join a diverse array of organizations currently using Atypon’s platform, including societies like the American Chemical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society (publishers of The New England Journal of Medicine), and the American Society of Civil Engineers; publishers such as Elsevier, Sage, and Taylor & Francis, and university presses.

This acquisition is part of our commitment at Wiley to supporting the advancement of scientific and scholarly research and helping authors to reach the widest audience possible and to create impact for their research, investing in the industry’s best technology experience and curating and protecting the version of record.