Cardiac surgeon Ahmet Kilic discusses the STS annual meeting sessions in which he presented that focus on increasing heart and lung donors, unmet challenges and groundbreaking work in organ transplantation.
Yeah, my name is Ahmed Killington. I'm a cardiac surgeon at johns Hopkins. I lead the surgical portion of the heart failure program. In addition to performing all aspects of cardiac surgery these past few years have been quite a bit of changes with the covid pandemic and this year's upcoming sts meeting is no exception. Originally we had planned an in person meeting in Sunny Miami. However, with the latest surge, we had to convert the in person meeting to a virtual format as a subspecialty lead for the cardiopulmonary failure portion of the program. This year, we've been working hard to ensure that the content is not diminished in any way. By this change in format, there will be a number of great videos, presentations, debates in this upcoming Years program and it will give our community a way to continue to engage scientifically with one another. This year, I've had the privilege of moderating too exciting sessions relate to thoracic transplantation. The first session is in the category of ask the experts and I chose to concentrate on the ever changing world of having more available heart and lung donors become available. Okay. As I'm sure many are aware there has always been an imbalance between available donor hearts and those patients with need of a heart transplant. This session I entitled o donor o donor where art thou and it will have three international experts. Dr Carmelo milano from Duke Dr Ash off from Vanderbilt and Dr David Della Sandra from massachusetts General Hospital. And unlike them on stage as we discussed the latest state of the art and heart transplantation donors. We'll touch base on how to make donors become more available. Advancements in the management of hepatitis C donors, groundbreaking work with xeno transplantation that is using genetically altered animals to service donor hearts for humans. The latest in ex vivo profusion and heart transplantation donation after circle to her death and a novel method of procuring organs utilizing normal thermic regional profusion to minimize the ischemic insult during the process, The hope is that during this 45 minute session that the audience is informed in the most up to date ways of successfully getting our patients on the heart transplant list to successful heart transplant. The second session is entitled New frontiers and transplantation and will focus on the latest stressors in getting patients suffering from end stage heart and lung failure to transplantation. In this current environment, we have a number of unmet challenges in heart and lung transplantation and as such, this session will touch on the breadth of topics. We'll discuss racial disparities in covid mortality following heart transplantation. We have certainly known for some time that we have work to do in this arena, but the twist of covid mortality. Post transplantation may highlight issues such as access to care and treatment biases. There's a talk on novel ambulatory vina venus ECMO that serves as bridge for patients suffering from lung failure will also debate emerging technique of normal thermic regional profusion for donation after circulatory death. A controversial way of ensuring that the ischemic insult during the procurement process is minimized. In this hour long session, we hope to engage the audience in the speakers in discussing what the current challenges and barriers are in transplantation and what methods there are to overcome these current unmet needs, mm hmm.
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