TEAM IZZY: LONG-TERM VISION
You established the Team Izzy Liver Transplant Program because you wanted to help advance current understanding of the transplant and regenerative medicine field. By providing funding for interdisciplinary lectures, supporting scientific research and innovation in the lab, and increasing supports for patients and families before, during, and after their hospital stays, SickKids is making progress every day.
Your generous, pledged support helps accelerate paediatric transplant research and improve the lives of children like Izzy who have undergone a transplant, as well as future patients who will need one. Because of you, we can forge new directions in research, education, and care which aim to diagnose patients like Izzy sooner, treat them smarter, and better predict their outcomes.
In the last two years alone, Team Izzy raised more than $1.2 million for the SickKids Liver Transplant Program. I cannot thank you enough for your ongoing generosity, and I wish you all the best at Team Izzy’s Secret Garden party in October.
Dr. Blayne Amir Sayed, Team Izzy Innovator in Surgical Transplantation, Surgical Lead for Paediatric Liver Transplantation and HPB Surgery, SickKids and Toronto General Hospital, Associate Scientist, Cell and Systems Biology, SickKids Research Institute.
TEAM IZZY LECTURESHIP IN HEPATOLOGY AND LIVER TRANSPLANTATION
To remain current about evolving diagnostic and treatment paradigms, continuous learning for health-care providers is necessary and a bedrock principle of academic medicine. The annual Team Izzy lecture highlights emerging liver transplantation research and clinical. It also helps to build relationships between the SickKids program and other programs around the world, foster collaborative research projects, and enhances care as our understanding of “gold standard” treatment evolves — this is absolutely essential to ensure that all SickKids patients receive world-class care.
This year’s keynote was from Dr. Adam Griesemer, director of the Pediatric Liver Transplant Program, the Pediatric Transplant Program and the Living Donor Transplant Program at the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and an associate professor in the Department of Surgery at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Dr. Griesemer treats patients with complex medical conditions and also specializes in minimally invasive techniques for living liver donors to reduce recovery time and complications. His surgical approach reduces some of the barriers traditional associated with living donors.
Other areas of his research include increasing immunologic tolerance and using genetically modified organs to address organ shortages and surgical risks. During his visit, Dr. Griesemer toured the SickKids Transplant and Regenerative Medicine Centre and generously provided a grand rounds presentation open to all SickKids staff and trainees.
CUTTING-EDGE EQUIPMENT FOR CUTTING-EDGE MEDICINE
The funds raised by Team Izzy have a powerful and tangible impact on transplant patients. This year, funds were used to replace and upgrade medical equipment, including purchasing high-end microvascular surgical instruments and a state-of-the-art ultrasound machine. Combining new instruments with advanced ultrasound monitoring improves patient outcomes and reduces risk to transplant patients.
New Instruments: Paediatric patients are not merely small adults. While they do have smaller blood vessels and organs, there are also specific surgical challenges owing to small vessel size and delicate tissues, which require precise microvascular instruments. Thanks to Team Izzy funds, the team is now equipped with top-of-the-line, high-precision titanium surgical instruments, which enable surgeons to perform complex reconstructions precisely and confidently in tight spaces, without damaging surrounding tissues.
Upgraded Ultrasound: The team’s ultrasound machine, which unexpectedly stopped working, was replaced free of charge, but some additional funds from Team Izzy meant that it could be upgraded to the newest model. This new ultrasound machine allows for an intra-operative assessment of blood vessels in the liver, which is a necessary means of evaluating the adequacy of the vascular reconstruction and the orientation of the new organ, in real time.
During paediatric transplants (liver, kidney, and intestine), real-time blood flow measurement is essential to measure arterial and venous flow, which allows early identification of compromised flow, therefore preventing thrombosis and subsequent graft failure. Our new ultrasound model has the most advanced level of precision and ease of interface on the market and is not widely available yet. Acquiring this new ultrasound has already saved lives — on more than one occasion, surgeons have identified an early problem and successfully modulated blood flow into the new liver.
DR. BLAYNE AMIR SAYED: TEAM IZZY INNOVATOR IN SURGICAL TRANSPLANTATION
Dr. Sayed and his team continue to investigate how acute and chronic liver injury, which causes cell death, primes the immune response in the liver. This is relevant in the development of chronic liver disease, and during the acute liver injury that occurs at the time of transplantation, and afterwards. Understanding how to reduce injury at the cellular level and how to avoid initiation of inflammatory cell death pathways has the potential to minimize organ and tissue damage and delay or prevent inflammatory or rejection responses, and improve both short and long-term patient outcomes.
Work in the Sayed lab has resulted in recent publications in Nature, the Journal of Hepatology, Nature Cell Biology, Physiology, Molecular Biology of the Cell, and other high-impact scientific journals. In addition to the Team Izzy Innovator award, which has been absolutely essential for developing their research program, the Sayed lab has received grant support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canadian Donation and Transplantation Research Program (CDTRP) and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS).
Dr. Sayed and Dr. Vicky Ng are also actively involved and leading clinical research. The SickKids liver transplant program is one of the premier paediatric transplant programs in the world. We are incredibly proud of our excellent short- and long-term outcomes, which are the best in North America. SickKids patients are achieving optimal liver function and health outcomes following transplantation – the true markers of a successful clinical program. We are committed to publishing our clinical outcomes and details of our clinical programs to help universalize the idea that optimal outcomes following paediatric transplantation should be the norm, and to find ways to continue to improve. We have already published studies on paediatric liver transplantation, live donor liver transplantation, and the standardized use of anonymous non-directed donors in paediatric liver transplantation. This work has been published in prominent journals, including Pediatric Transplantation, Paediatric Anaesthesia, Liver Transplantation, Transplantation, and the British Journal of Anaesthesia.
2025 Toronto Consensus Conference
In March 2025, the Toronto transplant program organized and hosted a landmark conference focusing on establishing best clinical practices for the safety of live liver donors. Team Izzy was one of the key sponsors of this conference: the International Liver Transplantation Society (ILTS) – International Living Donor Liver Transplantation Group (iLDLT) Consensus Conference on Living Liver Donor Safety. Dr. Sayed served as one of the three members of the scientific committee.
Live donor liver transplantation is the gold standard for paediatric patients. Successfully expanding the use of live donor transplantation for the benefit of our youngest patients requires that we ensure the utmost safety of our donors. This conference resulted in the drafting of four key consensus manuscripts that describe the best practices to ensure donor safety in the pre-operative, intra-operative, post-operative, and long-term periods. These manuscripts, currently in press with Liver Transplantation, are listed in a separate PDF.*
FULL CIRCLE SUPPORT
“Success” in liver transplant requires more than just a successful surgery. At SickKids, our Liver Transplant program has had a growing awareness that the mental health and emotional needs of both patient and caregivers must be approached with empathy and support in order to have an optimal outcome. It is increasingly recognized that health psychologists play a crucial role in helping patients understand and manage the mental and emotional factors that influence their physical health, such as stress, anxiety, chronic pain, and lifestyle behaviors such as diet and exercise habits.
Psychologists at SickKids work collaboratively with medical and surgical liver transplant teams to address the behavioral and cognitive aspects of illness, helping patients develop coping strategies, improve treatment adherence, and build resilience during recovery and they bridge the gap between mind and body in health-care delivery. By addressing mental barriers to healing and providing tools for stress management and behavioral change, they help patients feel more empowered and supported throughout their medical journey, leading to better health outcomes and improved quality of life. SickKids has developed the first health-related quality of life (HRQOL) tool for children who have undergone liver transplantation. This tool was created as a pencil-paper version. Since then, it has been expanded to over 10 languages and adapted into a web-based platform.
Your support for a dedicated psychologist for liver transplant recipients is life-changing and has helped to propel SickKids into its leadership role on the global stage, beyond just our patient and graft survival rates. As you know, we are in the process of hiring for this role and will keep you informed of our progress.
STAFFING UPDATE: DR. NICOLAS GOLDARACENA
Team Izzy has invested in a culture of innovation and excellence, which reinforces SickKids as a destination for top-tier talent and transformative ideas. Your investment provides funding for a prestigious annual lectureship, top-of-the-line surgical equipment, innovative research, and a dedicated patient support team — all which help us to achieve and maintain our status as leaders in the field.
It’s why SickKids successfully recruited Dr. Nicolas Goldaracena, former surgical director of the living donor liver transplant and pediatric transplant programs at the University of Virginia, to join our team. Dr. Goldaracena is widely recognized as an expert in the fields of paediatric transplantation, live donor liver transplantation, and paediatric hepatobiliary disease (HPB). He is an outstanding clinical researcher who has extensively published high- impact work. Drs. Sayed, Ng, Avitzur, and Ghanekar were all part of an international, dual-institution (SickKids and TGH) search committee that recruited Dr. Goldaracena, the clear top candidate. Similar to Dr. Sayed, Dr. Goldaracena will hold a joint appointment between SickKids and UHN, in which he will exclusively focus on paediatric and adult liver transplantation, live donor liver transplantation, and paediatric HPB surgery. Like Drs. Sayed and Ghanekar, prior to joining UVa Health, he was a highly esteemed Toronto transplant and HPB surgical fellow, and the group is thrilled to welcome him, his wife Josefina, and their three children to Toronto.
Thank You
Thank you for helping us prioritize the health and well-being of children, and for supporting the development of promising clinical, translational, and basic science research discoveries. We look forward to continuing our partnership in the years to come.