The award was given for her poster presentation on ‘Development of an Automatic Regulated Normothermic Kidney Preservation Device for Long-Term Organ Preservation’.
Dr Weissenbacher, a Clinical Research Fellow and DPhil student with Professor Peter Friend and Professor Constantin Coussios, is working with colleagues from OrganOx to develop a normothermic kidney perfusion device.
‘Normothermic kidney perfusion for a period of 24 hours or longer will have significant clinical advantages,’ says Dr Weissenbacher. ‘It provides the optimal platform for the delivery of strategies aimed at repairing and reconditioning kidneys that would otherwise be discarded. This will enlarge the donor pool and enable more successful renal transplantations.’
The team are building a machine for the normotheric kidney perfusion device from scratch, and the first presentation about this was at the American Transplant Congress. During the meeting, judges selected Dr Weissenbacher’s poster presentation as the best from around 200 posters.
The 2017 American Transplant Congress, a joint meeting of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and the American Society of Transplantation, was held in Chicago, Illinois.