Transplantation

Yeah.

So lucky.

And how are you feeling now, Leonard? I mean, you know, we, we hear of someone having one organ transplanted, but you had a double lung transplant.

Yeah.

I feel really, really good.

I'm the current president of IXA.

And on behalf of the Transplantation Society and International Xenotransplantation Society, I would like to welcome you to this webinar, which is jointly hosted by these two societies and associations.

We are gathered here today with a panel of experts to discuss some of the papers that were jointly published in the Transplantation Journal and in Xenotransplantation Journal.

We have Dr. Jonathan Brownberg, executive editor of Transplantation here, and Leo Buehler, who's the editor of Xenotransplantation here.

So IXA, the International Xenotransplantation Council, have been compiling data for many years.

And finally, they are able to present this data to you in form of multiple papers which have just been published.

And we'll hold the other questions to the end.

And I would like to introduce our next speaker, Dr. Jeff, Professor Jeff Fishman.

Hello, AJT readers.

Welcome to the September 2026 Editor's Pick podcast for the American Journal of Transplantation.

I'm one of your hosts, Roslyn Mannin, transplant nephrologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

And I'm joined as usual by my co-host, Dr. Alberto Sanchez-Fueyo, transplant hepatologist extraordinaire, Deputy Director of the Institute of Liver Studies at King's College, London.

The next paper we'll speak about is on the relative relevance of donor-derived cell-free DNA and urinary chemokines as non-invasive markers for the diagnosis of kidney allograft rejection by Irina Torres and colleagues.

Mostly all at the University of Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain.

Senior author is Ariel Bestard, and that's accompanied by an editorial, Signal Without Overreach Toward a Biology-Granted Framework for Non-Invasive Biomarkers in Kidney Transplantation by Valeria Moss and Dr. Sanchez-Fueyo and myself.

We'll continue the story of kidney transplant by the next paper, pre- and post- Kidney Transplant, Nathostomiasis, Clinical Manifestations, Treatment, and Outcomes by Suryoran Wachirananan and colleagues.

As the need for transplantation grows, innovation is creating new possibilities for patients waiting for a second chance.

And joining us as our last guest today is Dr. Dishan Akhtar.

Dr. Akhtar is an assistant professor of surgery and of immunology and immunotherapy at the Aiken School of Medicine of Mount Sinai and a liver transplant surgeon at the Reconati Miller Transplantation Institute, which is one of the nation's leading transplant centers.

His clinical practice focuses on liver transplantation and complex surgery, while his research is helping advance the future of organ preservation and transplantation.

The Institute's groundbreaking work in organ perfusion has been advanced through the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and Dr. Akhtar's work focuses on expanding access to transplantation by helping more donated organs become viable for transplant.

Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on this podcast and for bringing this up.

I'm one of the transplant surgeons.

I work at the Reckonati Miller Institute for Transplantation at Mount Zion Hospital in New York.

About five years later, the NKF, working with George Schreiner, decided that they would dialyze a patient on the floor of the House of Representatives during hearings regarding the possibility of making dialysis a program funded by the United States.

Shep Glazer was the president of the National Association of Patients on Hemodialysis and Transplantation.

he appeared with a renal fellow from Georgetown on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The fellow had instructions if there were any problem to stop the procedure immediately.

And he said in his paper, are you surprised? Look at all the transplant surgeons, they're all white men.

These studies were corroborated by Ash Segal in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.

Bert Kosinski at the American Society of Transplantation wrote a white paper suggesting that there should be special consideration for African Americans in transplantation, and it was a beautiful paper, but nothing happened.

Thanksgiving 1999, I was sitting in a bar waiting for Prudence to come join me to see a movie, and I read an article in the New England Journal by these Harvard scholars, Drs.