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Dear colleagues,

It is a particular honor and pleasure for me to welcome you to this year's annual meeting of the Austrian Society for Transplantation, Transfusion and Genetics "AUSTROTRANSPLANT".

After last year's conference in Eisenstadt, we are holding this year's conference in beautiful Salzburg. The organizing committee is pleased to be able to present to you, as usual in just under three days, current developments and areas of discussion in the field of organ transplantation, both solid organ transplantation and stem cell transplantation.

The motto of this year's annual conference is "Organ Transplant Tension - Possibilities and Reality". Due to the increasingly pressing discrepancy between the need and supply of organs for a transplant, new innovative research is being pursued in many areas to deal with this situation, which is a focus of the program design at this year's annual conference.

There will again be an opportunity to discuss relevant developments in plenary sessions as well as to discuss them in detail in topic-related break-out sessions. There will also be separate poster sessions with space for exchange and discussion.

A particular concern of the society is the promotion of young talent in the field of transplantation, so that several prizes were announced as part of the conference, which are awarded in a separate young investigator session.

As a characteristic feature of the AUSTROTRANSPLANT annual conference, the scientific program is aimed particularly at nurses from the transplant centers. This time, the format planned here is interprofessional sessions in the organ-related parallel sessions, so that these sessions were designed together with nurses and doctors and we can hopefully create a forum for a common exchange.

We would also like to thank the industry for their generous support, without which the conference would not be possible.

The organizing committee would like to warmly welcome you to Salzburg!

Matthias Biebl (Congress President)
Christiane Rösch (Congress Secretary)
Manfred Kalteis (Congress Secretary)