We are incredibly grateful for your generous gifts, including donations from Team Izzy’s Secret Garden fundraising event, that support the Team Izzy Liver Transplant Program and deliver the best possible outcomes for all our young patients.
SickKids is Canada’s largest paediatric liver transplant program and one of the busiest in North America, performing over 75 per cent of Canada’s paediatric liver transplants. We manage the country’s most complex patients. Surgeons such as Dr. Blayne Amir Sayed perform transplants in babies as young as four weeks old and weighing as little as 3 kilograms. Like his predecessors on the liver transplant team, he remains committed to providing the most advanced and compassionate pre- and post-transplant care, while relentlessly pursuing new discoveries in his lab that will transform patient outcomes and lifelong health.
Beyond cutting-edge equipment, another well-documented challenge to health care innovation is the early-discovery stage funding gap. Support for catalyst grants will overcome this barrier. The grants fund bench research, which fuels innovation and attracts the crucial, additional support that will play a vital role in propelling ideas from breakthrough to clinical and commercial successes. Below is a summary of your impact to date made possible because of the support from the Team Izzy community which has, so far, raised over $800,000! And remember, this is just the beginning. The seeds of your gifts will continue to bear fruit long into the future and you will see greater impact over time.
Team Izzy Lectureship in Hepatology and Liver Transplantation
Bringing liver transplant specialists together in the same room is tremendously beneficial for knowledge promotion and exchange, professional networking, and to advance research and patient care. This year, SickKids specialists learned from Dr. George Mazariegos, co-director of paediatric liver and intestine transplantation at the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, a leader and statesman in the global paediatric liver transplant community. His seminal research led to the discovery of a novel treatment that eliminates the routine use of steroids following a transplant to prevent rejection of the transplanted organ. “With our novel approach, we have been able to maximize the benefits that children get from transplantation while minimizing the procedure’s risks and complications.” This new approach made transplantation an option for children in whom the risks had previously been deemed too great.
SickKids is one of the leading paediatric liver transplant centres in the world, but to retain this standing we must continually improve the quality of care we provide — these improvements are only possible by having interactions with other leaders in the field, like Dr. George Mazariegos, welcoming their perspectives and critiques and challenging ourselves to reach a higher standard.
Team Izzy Innovator in Surgical Transplantation and Catalyst Grants
Dr. Sayed is the surgical lead for liver transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery at SickKids, a member of the Ajmera Transplant Centre at Toronto General Hospital (TGH) and an associate scientist in the Cell Biology Program at SickKids Research Institute.
Donor support for research labs like his is vital because it enables teams to initiate studies prior to receiving grant funding. Without support from donors like you, many scientists would not be able to get their ideas — or preliminary data — off the ground. Sustained funding, like that provided by Team Izzy, ensures that scientists like Dr. Sayed can maintain their clinical practice and provide consistent staffing for their research. In turn, this means that novel discoveries in the lab make it to the patient’s bedside that much faster.
The liver transplant program at SickKids, working closely with TGH, is a world leader in live donor liver transplantation, in particular pioneering the utilization of anonymous, non-directed live donor liver grafts to transplant children who do not have access to live donation. This approach leads to shorter wait times and less death on the waitlist for our patients. Dr. Sayed and his team have presented an alternative at the international transplant meetings across the world, including the International Liver Transplantation Society and the Society for Pediatric Liver Transplantation.
A major challenge to liver transplantation is the wait for a donor liver. Many children can wait up to 10 months for a liver, some of whom are critically ill. As they wait, their bodies often deteriorate making them too ill for transplantation or setting them up for prolonged hospitalizations post transplant. Despite prioritization for paediatric patients, children must still compete against very sick adults for the same organs.
Dr. Sayed’s lab is researching how injury and cell death in the liver prime the hepatic immune system and result in chronic inflammation, fibrosis (scarring of the liver) and eventually liver failure. This is important in the progression of chronic liver disease, but also in the context of liver transplantation, in which the immune system attacks the new liver following transplantation. The most common cause of re-transplantation in children is chronic fibrosis of the new liver graft. Dr. Sayed maintains that we have unique opportunities to minimize injury to the new liver and alter the way the immune system responds during the process of transplantation. During transplantation, the cells of the new organ become stressed and can die, signaling “danger” to neighbouring cells and triggering an inflammatory response. Dr. Sayed’s team is focused on ways to alter cell death and inflammatory pathways in order to minimize acute and chronic liver injury. This has the potential to expand the use of less-than-perfect organs, which are susceptible to injury during transplantation, increase the donor pool and decrease organ competition. It can also improve long-term outcomes following liver transplantation by “re-educating” the immune system.
Your support provides crucial funding for Dr. Sayed’s lab. The team recently published their findings in Nature, Nature Cell Biology and Physiology. They also recently received a USD 200,000 grant from the American Society of Transplant Surgeons to expand this vital work, all initiated and supported by Team Izzy.
Patient and Family Supports
Communication and support for patients and their families is an essential part of the Team Izzy Liver Transplant Program. It’s imperative that we provide the best in complex and specialized care and ensure a positive patient and family experience. Donations to Team Izzy ensure that a dedicated psychologist and psychometrist are available to patients and their families before, during and after transplants.
We know poverty is one of the biggest barriers to healing and recovery, and your support directly impacts more families by providing access to important items that would otherwise be unaffordable such as parking, meals and accommodations. Your generosity for the Patient Amenities Fund helps to address these kinds of immediate needs.
Thank You
Our liver transplant team is committed to providing the most advanced and compassionate care, while pursuing outside-of-the-box ideas that can transform child health. But they can’t do it alone. They rely on the support of donors like you. Your generosity has enhanced our understanding of transplants through interdisciplinary lectures, catalyzed innovation in Dr. Sayed’s lab, and funded patient and family supports before, during and after surgeries and hospital stays. With your continued support, we will help more kids overcome obstacles to live, to live long, and to live well – a mantra that continues to drive Dr. Sayed and his committed team.
“We know the path ahead is not straightforward but feel so deeply fortunate we get to forge it together.” — Elizabeth and Tim Tutsch
Thank you for joining Elizabeth and Tim in the fight for the best possible outcomes for children like Izzy. Thank you for your incredible generosity — your partnership enables us to pursue new ideas, train the next generation of experts, and elevate care so that all paediatric liver transplant patients survive and thrive.