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Pediatric liver transplantation: Personal perspectives on historical achievements and future challenges

This review presents the author's personal perspective and contributions to the first steps, the development, the current status, and the remaining issues of pediatric liver transplantation (LT). Innumerable children around the world who have undergone LT have reached adulthood. The techniques have reached maturity. As shown by my own group's experience, grafts donated by living donors might provide the best short‐term and longterm results. Debate persists about the optimal immunosuppression (IS), although the place of tacrolimus remains unchallenged. Tolerance induction protocols aiming to induce microchimerism have been tried in clinical transplantation without convincing results. Withdrawal of maintenance IS is possible in some children who underwent liver transplantation who have excellent clinical status and normal liver function tests but is not without risk of rejection and subsequent worsening of histology. The current trend favored by the Brussels' group is to minimize IS as soon after transplant as possible, aiming to obtain a state of “prope” or “almost” tolerance. Liver grafts are threatened in the long term by increasing hepatitis‐related fibrosis, resulting most likely from immunological assault. Nowadays, the focus is on the longterm survival, quality of life (growth, academic performance, employment, self‐fulfillment, fertility, raising a family, etc.), induction of tolerance, prevention of risks bound to decades of IS (nephrotoxicity and neurotoxicity, cardiovascular risk, de novo malignancies, etc.), and prevention of graft fibrosis. All these issues are fertile fields for younger scientists. Liver Transplantation 22 1284–1294 2016 AASLD