Mohamed Elzawahry reflects on winning an Andrew Paris Memorial Fellowship.

I am a doctoral researcher within the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford and a higher speciality surgical trainee in General Surgery. My clinical and research interests are centred on pancreas transplantation, particularly how we preserve and assess donor organs before transplantation.

Pancreas transplantation can be life-changing for a select group of people with diabetes, yet it remains one of the most challenging areas of solid organ transplantation. A large proportion of donated pancreases are declined, often because it is difficult to judge graft quality with confidence or to protect organs from injury during preservation. My academic work has focused on understanding this issue and on finding more reliable, objective ways to look after and evaluate pancreas grafts before they are transplanted.

During my doctoral research, I worked on pancreas graft preservation using oxygenated hypothermic machine perfusion. Alongside this, I developed laboratory models to assess graft function and explored magnetic resonance imaging-based approaches to provide more objective information about graft quality. This work has contributed to the design of a first-in-human safety and feasibility clinical trial of oxygenated hypothermic perfusion in pancreas transplantation (HOPP), which is due to start recruitment shortly.

While much of my research to date has been in hypothermic perfusion, I intend to gain hands-on experience in normothermic ex vivo pancreas perfusion (NEVP) as a preservation strategy. NEVP is an emerging technique that allows the pancreas to be kept functioning on a machine at body temperature, creating opportunities not only for preservation but also for real-time assessment and, potentially, reconditioning of grafts.

The Andrew Paris Travelling Fellowship will allow me to spend four weeks at the Ajmera Transplant Centre, University Health Network in Toronto, one of the world’s leading centres for pancreas transplantation and NEVP. During the Fellowship, I will observe clinical pancreas and islet transplantation, attend transplant clinics and multidisciplinary meetings, and receive practical laboratory training in NEVP.

A key aim of the Fellowship is to bring this experience back to the UK and further investigate NEVP for pancreas preservation. what I have learned through local teaching, collaboration with colleagues, and dissemination within the BTS community. The visit will also support longer-term links between UK and Canadian centres, supporting future collaborative research in pancreas preservation and assessment.

I am grateful to the British Transplantation Society for awarding me the Andrew Paris Travelling Fellowship. The Fellowship offers a valuable opportunity to learn a specialised novel technique at a leading international centre, establish international collaboration, and apply that knowledge in a way that holds the potential to improve pancreas graft utilisation and outcomes for transplant patients.