All across the world, transplant physicians, nurses and healthcare professionals are undertaking interventional strategies and research studies to understand the value of healthy lifestyle education and interventions such as exercise, in the long term treatment of transplant recipients.
The World Transplant Games Federation, in representing the worldwide transplant community, has also introduced its ‘Fit for Life!’ program to activate and motivate transplant recipients to commit to a lifestyle of movement and activity. In 2017, it introduced its Billion Step Program to motivate transplant recipients to take the first step towards a physically active lifestyle.
This goal of this symposium is to bring together current thinking about key advances and next steps for developing evidence-based exercise and physical activity interventions to improve long term outcomes in transplantation. The objective will be to showcase current strategies from around the world being undertaken by staff with direct patient contact, and researchers conducting clinical trials in this area. Importantly the session will include patient partners to present on the lived experience of engaging in a healthy lifestyle post-transplant.

This one-day program will cover topics such as addressing the need for advocacy, gender disparities in transplantation, what it means to be a successful woman in transplantation, new research on issues of sex and gender in transplantation and how to create a culture of academic success. The program will afford a series of interactive talks with audience participation. 

4th Workshop of the Virtual Global Transplant Laboratory

In this workshop we will have presentations and discussions regarding new developments in immune monitoring techniques that are relevant for assessing the immune status of patients receiving stem cell or organ transplants. In particular, we are interested in new techniques and in methods for standardizing testing.

Cell therapy of diseased or failing organs is an area that has generated great interest in Regenerative medicine. The choice of using isolated cells or stem cells varies between target organ and/or purpose. In this workshop we will discuss advantages and disadvantages of cell transplants vs stem cells.