Welcome to the
International Intestinal Rehabilitation & Transplant Association
Intestinal Failure Journal
A Message from the IIRTA President - February 2025
President 2023–2025
First and foremost is CIIRTA 2025 in Sweden 19th CIIRTA – 10-13 September 2025 – Gothenburg, Sweden. Hosted by the teams in Gothenburg and Stockholm, this is sure to be the highlight of the year.
Abstract submission is now open. I encourage you and your teams to submit your work and share your knowledge. You will find all the simple details of how to submit your abstracts via the congress website, including details of scientific awards. The deadline for submission is February 27, 2025.
This year, we have a new scientific award. The "Victoria De Mare Young Investigator Award" from the Fundacion Gondolesi is named in honour of a long-term survivor of an isolated intestinal transplant who has gone on to actively promote organ donation.
Exciting initiatives for the congress include joint sessions with IPTA and ESPGHAN, “True North” discussion sessions, as well as the IIRTA’s second Women In Transplantation (WIT) event.
Please follow and contribute to our various social media @ciirta2025 for updates.
Registration will open in March.
IIRTA ELECTIONS
I hope you will have been aware that we are currently undergoing the election process for the next council. Positions are open for President-Elect, Secretary/ Treasurer, and three councilors. Thank you to everyone who has stepped up to go for a position. Nominations close on February 2nd.
I encourage everyone to vote in the election in the coming weeks, and help steer the society for the future.
AORTIC TUBE SURVEY
You will shortly receive a survey on aortic tube complications in multivisceral transplantation. This multi-centre survey will look at world-wide practice, complications and long-term outcomes. Please fill in your experiences so the global reach of our society can help further our surgical techniques.
PUBLICATION GUIDELINES
IIRTA have now finalized our Study Proposal and Publication Guidelines. This document will guide the use of studies developed utilizing IIRTA data or collaboration between centres under the IIRTA umbrella. Please read this document if you have ideas for research using our transplant or intestinal failure registry data, or if you would like to work.
Click here to view the guidelinesINTESTINAL FAILURE JOURNAL
Finally, as our journal continues to grow, I invite you all to consider submitting your manuscripts. There is no article publishing fee in 2025.
Intestinal Failure | Journal | ScienceDirect.com by ElsevierSending my best wishes for a happy and successful 2025.
Jonathan Hind
IIRTA President
Congratulations to our 2023 Living Legends Recipients
International Intestinal Transplant Registry (IITR)
IIRTA Survey - Outcomes for Abdominal Wall Closer in Transplant Patients
As you will certainly know, non-vascularized rectus fascia (NVRF) transplantation was first described in 2009 (Gondolesi et al. Transplantation 2009;87:1884–8) as a novel technique to close the abdominal wall after solid organ transplantation. By using this technique, extensive abdominal wall repair was avoided and the technique is gaining interest worldwide. Later the vascularized fascia transplant was introduced as alternative (VRF).
So far, experience with (N)VRF transplantation is scarcely reported. At our transplant center in Leuven, Belgium, we performed our first case of NVRF transplant in September 2020. Dr. Nele Van De Winkel is an abdominal surgeon at our center who is specialized in abdominal wall surgery. Based on her specialty she developed a specific interest regarding (N)VRF and is currently working on a PhD thesis on this topic. She recently completed a systematic literature review, published in Transplantation Reviews (2021 Jun 4;35(4):100634). This review revealed that data on long-term outcome following NVRF regarding the strength and functionality of the abdominal wall is scarce.
Therefore we took the initiative for a multi-center survey on this topic to collect and analyze the world-wide practice and long-term outcome after (non-)vascularized fascia transplantation.
For this survey we have developed an excel sheet (1 excel file) and survey manual (PDF). We would be very grateful if you or one of your team members could have a look into this questionnaire and return your response directly to Nele (nele.vandewinkel@uzleuven.be) (1 sheet for each individual case).
It would be worth considering to publish in the near future the results of this multicenter survey if we can collect a sufficient number of cases performed worldwide. Participating centers would of course be granted a co-authorship.
Many thanks for your help and support. Please do not hesitate to contact us directly in case you have any further questions on this email.
Best regards,
Laurens Ceulemans (transplant surgeon)
Nele Van De Winkel (abdominal surgeon and PhD student)
On behalf of the Leuven LIFT team
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Address
International Intestinal Rehabilitation & Transplant Association
c/o The Transplantation Society
740 Notre-Dame Ouest
Suite 1245
Montréal, QC, H3C 3X6
Canada