The Transplantation Society – New Key Opinion Leaders of Tomorrow 2006

Abstract

One of the new initiatives taken by the immediate past president of The Transplantation Society, KJ Wood, is to introduce a new series of meetings named ‘New Key Opinion Leaders of Tomorrow’. The Transplantation Society invites the leading young investigators in the field of transplantation to participate in this meeting together with the present leaders of the field. The key objective of this meeting is to identify the potential key opinion leaders of tomorrow. Each presentation during the meeting was jointly given by the senior and junior investigators. The meeting in Buenos Aires covered six main topics on clinical, translational and basic transplantation. These included: innate immunity and inflammation; transplant infectious diseases; tumour and transplantation; medical and ethical aspects of transplantation; dendritic cells (stimulating and manipulating the immune response to a transplant); and ABO incompatible donor recipient pairs. This report focuses on the emerging biological therapeutics and their ramifications on clinical transplantation.

Keywords::

• cellular therapy
• cytokine therapy
• immunosuppressive drugs
• tolerance
• transplantation
• rejection

Acknowledgements

PHT thanks TTS for inviting him to present his work in this meeting. The author acknowledges TTS funding on his trip to this meeting. PHT was funded by the MRC and Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh as a Clinical Training Fellow (2001 – 2004).