Preface
Over the last decades, the principle of innovation has been defined through research in business area. Meanwhile the necessity of this concept was felt in other professions as well. Surgery as one of the oldest and most interested fields has been built upon continuous innovation. Surgical innovation is described as a novel approach to a still unsolved surgical problem or to improve a pre-existing modality or technique. The transplantation of abdominal organs characteristically requires a multidisciplinary approach in which several surgical as well as medical specialties are involved in different aspects including diagnosis, indication setting and therapy. Therefore, in transplantation field as a high surgical specialty, the innovations should pay attention not only on surgical aspects, but due to the integration and collaboration of other disciplines, it should also be expanded to medical and ethical approaches.
Transplantation medicine is alive by pioneer intelligence, enthusiasm and the power of innovations which are enlightened by the numerous clinical and basic-science researche in this field. Through the cooperative work at bed-side as well as in laboratory, it is now possible to organize a successful transplantation program and keep it proficiently functioning. The main intention of the Heidelberg Transplant Symposia is to provide for scientific minds an open atmosphere to present and exchange new concepts as well as state of the art approaches and to discuss the scientific controversies. The major subjects presenting at the Symposium are related to kidney, liver and pancreas transplantation, particularly long-term management of transplanted patients including infection as well as immunologic challenges, new immunosuppressive concepts and related proceeding clinical studies, extended donor criteria in liver transplantation, and the novel field of hepatocyte transplantation. The goal of this meeting is to stimulate scientific thinking and to motivate innovative ideas.
The prepared supplement contains all the lectures presented at the 4th Heidelberg Transplant Symposium which takes place annually in Heidelberg as a multidisciplinary meeting. The founders of this symposium would like to express their gratitude to the editorial board as well as the production team of the renowned Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation Journal especially Ms. Caroline Bracken for preciously managing the publication process of the supplement. Definitely without their invaluable endeavors this supplement could not be issued in due time. Furthermore, we would also like to express our deepest appreciation to Ms. Dr. Michaella Handermann and Mr. Dr. Hamidreza Fonouni for their tremendous diligence in organizing the Symposium and publication of the supplement.
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