Dear Colleagues, 

I hope you are beginning to enjoy this new season and have renewed your goal of active research in the field of xenotransplantation.  I am very happy to inform you the IXA Council has continued work on several initiatives announced during our Congress in Osaka. In addition to their main role as a member of Council, I have asked each Councilor to lead one initiative, which will advance our Association. The initiatives are:

• Awards and Fundraising: Michael Breimer and Shuji Miyagawa
• Education and Public Perception: Michael Breimer, Shuji Miyagawa and Chung-Gyu Park
• Communications and Website: Gilles Blancho and Agnes Azimzadeh
• Membership: Eckhard Wolf
• Regulatory Affairs: Chung-Gyu Park and David Sachs
• Melbourne 2015 Congress: Peter Cowan
• Ethics Committee: Robin Pierson
• Vanguard Committee: Bernhard Hering

I will share further updates on the progress of these activities and other important updates with you throughout the year.

I am very happy to announce after careful review and consideration, the Awards Committee has selected the 2013 recipient of the Carl-Gustav Groth Xeno prize. The 2013 winner is Dr. Joshua P. Waldman of the University of Toledo. The title of the winning paper is “Blocking porcine sialoadhesin improves extracorporeal porcine liver xenoperfusion with human blood”. To view the abstract or access the content, please click here. Dr. Waldman will be officially recognized during the 2015 Joint Congress in Melbourne, Australia. The papers nominated in 2013 represent the highest caliber and this was a difficult decision for the Committee. A special thank you is owed to the publisher of Xenotransplantation, Wiley for their continued support of this award.

The Council of IXA would like to invite all IXA members to provide ideas for a new logo for our Association. We have traditionally utilized the lamassu, a mythical Assyrian human-headed chimera, as the logo for the IXA. Following recent discussions that the lamassu may present a confusing image to the general public, the Council would like to reimagine the logo as something more modern and stylized. I welcome suggestions, ideas and images for alternative logos from all IXA members. Please email your thoughts and ideas to the Association’s Coordinator at sections@tts.org.