Professor Manas was educated and trained in Cape Town, South Africa and completed fellowships at ‘Johns Hopkins - USA’ and ‘Paul-Brousse, Paris’. He was the recipient of the ’CJ Adams/Sandoz Traveling Fellowship’ to the UK in 1993 and joined the NHS at the Freeman Hospital in 1994.

Professor Manas attained a personal chair in Transplantation at Newcastle University in  2007 and has been instrumental in successfully developing three super-regionally funded transplant programmes in the North East of England - namely: Liver, Pancreas and Islet transplantation – as well as establishing and managing Liver and Pancreas cancer surgery in Newcastle.

Professor Manas is also a member of a number of national committees including NICE, Liver and Pancreas Advisory Groups, British Transplant Society and ELTA and was recently involved in re-designing the organ donor retrieval service on a national level. He is also Chair of the Transplant Surgeons Forum and has a well established national and international research reputation in primary liver cancer, radio-frequency ablation of liver tumours and liver transplantation for primary liver cancer.

More recently Professor Manas has been developing the UK’s very first ‘Institute for Transplantation’ on the Freeman Hospital site – a fully integrated facility dedicated to all aspects of transplantation as well as fostering research and development all under one roof.

Mr Rix graduated in 1989 from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and was appointed as a substantive Consultant Urologist at the Freeman Hospital in 2003.

Mr Soomro was appointed as a Consultant in 1998 and is currently the clinical lead in Urology. He has led the department in developing and delivering complex minimally invasive urological surgery. He is involved in training in minimally invasive surgery within UK and Europe.

I am a clinical scientist based in the Northern Institute for Cancer Research.  I trained principally as a gastroenterologist, my academic career was supported by a Welcome Trust Clinical Scientist award, followed by an AASLD Fellowship and 3 years as a post doctoral scientist in Scott Friedmans Laboratory Mount Sinai Medical School in New York.  I am now the clinical lead for the management of patients with hepatocellular cancer (HCC) in the North East of England, promoting translational research within this patient group.  HCC complicates chronic liver disease, making targeting the tumour particularly important in these patients.  Over the last decade the referrals of patients with this cancer type have increased 10 fold in our region, reflecting both a rising incidence of the disease in obese and diabetic patients, but also the success of the 'Cancer Plan 2000', directing the management of these patients to multidisciplinary teams.  My basic science projects focus on the identification of biomarkers and candidates for targeted drug therapy.

James Shaw is Professor of Regenerative Medicine for Diabetes at Newcastle University and Honorary Consultant Physician at the Newcastle Diabetes Centre and Freeman Hospital.

He trained in diabetes and endocrinology in Aberdeen where he completed a PhD as an MRC fellow with Kevin Docherty exploring gene and cell replacement therapy for diabetes.

A Glaxo-Smith-Kline senior fellowship enabled him to move to Newcastle and join the world-acclaimed diabetes team there. In addition to expanding his laboratory-based group, he has established a regional insulin pump service, is a member of the Newcastle pancreas transplant team and clinical lead for islet transplantation.

Professor Shaw chairs the United Kingdom Islet Transplant Consortium who have attained dedicated NHS funding for this intervention as an established clinical procedure. He is Principal Investigator on the first UK multicentre grants to rigorously determine psychosocial and biomedical outcomes of islet transplantation. He has recently been awarded a £1.3M Diabetes UK multicentre grant to foster collaborative UK research in severe hypoglycaemia, optimised analogue treatment, pump therapy and continuous glucose monitoring.

He is also Newcastle lead for diabetic regenerative medicine, chairing the North East Stem Cell Institute Clinical Translation Working Group. He co-edited an international textbook with Prof James Shapiro: ‘Islet Transplantation and Beta Cell Replacement Therapy’.

Professor Shaw remains a committed physician, indebted to his superlative multidisciplinary team and dedicated to supporting those with diabetes in achieving optimal overall glycaemic control and quality of life unencumbered by debilitating hypoglycaemia and chronic complications of hyperglycaemia.