An Interview with Prof. Luca Brazzi
OBM Transplantation Editorial Office 
LIDSEN Publishing Inc., 2000 Auburn Drive, One Chagrin Highlands, Suite 200, Beachwood, OH, USA
Received: July 01, 2022 | Accepted: July 01, 2022 | Published: July 03, 2022
OBM Transplantation 2022, Volume 6, Issue 3, doi:10.21926/obm.transplant.2203161
Recommended citation: OBM Transplantation Editorial Office. An Interview with Prof. Luca Brazzi. OBM Transplantation 2022; 6(3): 161; doi:10.21926/obm.transplant.2203161.
© 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the conditions of the Creative Commons by Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is correctly cited.
Prof. Dr. Luca Brazzi
1. Could You Please Provide Your Personal Information & Photos (Portrait and One from Research (Laboratory, Clinic, Etc.))
I am full Professor in Anesthesia and Intensive Care at University of Turin (Italy) and Director of the Anesthesia and Intensive Unit at 'Città della Salute e della Scienza' University Hospital in Turin (Italy).
2. Could You Please Tell Us Your Scientific Background?
I graduated in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Milan in 1990. In 1995 I got the PhD in Intensive Science and in 1996 the Specialty in Anesthesia and Intensive Care. Between 1994 and 1996 I covered the role of Staff physician at 'Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico' hospital in Milan (Italy). In 1996 I became Assistant Professor in Anesthesia and Intensive Care at University of Milan (Italy). Between 2011 and 2014 I have been Associate Professor in Anesthesia and Intensive Care and Chief of the Anesthesia and Intensive Care Unit at Sassari University hospital (Italy). Since 2015 I have been directing the Anesthesia and Intensive Unit at 'Città della Salute e della Scienza' University Hospital in Turin (Italy). In 2018 I became Full Professor in Anesthesia and Intensive Care at the University of Turin (Italy).
I collaborated either with the ‘Società Italiana di Anestesia, Analgesia, Rianimazione e Terapia Intensiva’ (SIAART) as Chief of Emergency Scientific Area or with the European Society of Anesthesia and Intensive Care (ESAIC) as Chair of the Sustainability Committee, Chair of Scientific Subcommittee on Resuscitation, Emergency Medicine and Trauma and Council Member for Italy. Since 2022 I have been elected as member of the ESAIC Board of Directors.
3. Can You Share Your Career Development Story Briefly? For Example, What Cases Have Influenced You the Most?
I cannot say that I chose anesthesia for specific interest in the field. I approached the Institute of Anesthesia in Milan, at the time directed by Prof. Damia, mainly for my interest in underwater and hyperbaric medicine (which is a branch of anesthesia). When I started attending the Intensive Care Unit, I realized how fascinating applied physiology was and how the school of anesthesia focused on this area. Basically, I approached the Institute with the aim of obtaining information about a possible internship and I never left it.
4. Is There a Book You’ve Read that You’d Recommend Universally (i.e., to Everyone You Meet)?
It is difficult to identify, among the many available on the market, a selection of particularly interesting books. Given my particular interest in physiology, I believe that among the books that cannot be missing in the library of a young anesthesia there are Nunn's Applied Respiratory Physiology, Stoelting's Anesthesia and Co-Existing Disease and West's Respiratory Physiology.
5. What Is Your Main Research Area? What Got You Interested in Scientific Research in the First Place?
Working in the group directed by Prof. Gattinoni my main scientific interests were acute respiratory failure (ARDS) and extracorporeal circulatory support. In the context of the Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Residency Program, which I directed first in Sassari (Italy) for 3 years and then in Turin (Italy) for 6 years, I focused on training with the use of full-scale simulation programs.
In more recent years, these interests have been joined by other issues including that of sustainability in anesthesia is the one to which I am currently devoting particular attention. It is in fact known that healthcare activities, in particular those carried out in the operating room, have a heavy impact on the environment either for the enormous amount of waste with a high environmental impact that is produced or for the impact that the same drugs used to induce anesthesia have on the environment.
6. Where Are Your Sources of Information? Where do You Get Your Latest News about Transplant Research? Where do You Take Inspiration from?
With the enormous development of scientific databases and with the ease with which information is available today, it has become easy to read up on research activities that are carried out internationally. Nonetheless, it is important to be clear about what information we are interested in acquiring. In fact, multicenter works have grown and are born with the aim of ratifying the effectiveness of treatments/procedures already developed and known to exist. There are, on the other hand, and I think they are more interesting for those like me who are more interested in pathophysiological mechanisms, smaller works, often monocentric, which focus on innovative hypotheses which, even if interesting, are far from being applicable on a large scale. The innovations in the transplant sector are often placed in this second type also due to the relative limited number of cases available.
7. What Is Your Long-term Research Goal?
COVID-19 pandemic has rekindled attention on infections and superinfections from multi-drug-resistant microorganisms in the intensive setting. Thanks to a greater use of microbiology investigations induced by the presence of COVID-19, it has been worldwide realized that the problem of multidrug-resistant germs is growing and that it is necessary and urgent to implement antimicrobial stewardship programs focusing on early and optimal management antimicrobial therapy in order to avoid finding ourselves, in the short term, in the inability to adequately manage infectious problems no longer responding to the molecules currently available.
8. What Are the Recent Research Trends that You, as a Scholar, Would Suggest OBM Transplantation to Observe and to Follow in the Coming Years?
Although transplantation activity has grown enormously, it continues to be limited by the availability of organs. It is therefore a priority that research focuses on optimal management of available organs by increasing the pool of possible donors. Of major interest are the donation programs after cardiac death (DCD) and those aimed at the recovery of sub-optimal organs to be ‘in vitro’ reconditioned and re-evaluated.
9. Do You Have Any Suggestions or Recommendations for Young Scientists, for Instance, Your Students and Young Collaborators?
In recent years, the work market place, at least in Italy, has seen an enormous increase in job opportunities: the generational turnover increased, the recruitment opportunities enhanced, and the contract in Residency Programs too. This meant, for young colleagues, less interest and stimulus towards research and objectives to reach leading to a general flattening of the quality of training and, consequently, of the quality of work and research. It is a priority that young doctors regain curiosity and the desire to 'do more' not only to grow professionally but, above all, to remove the risk of a clinical practice based on 'it has always been done like this'.
10. What do You Think of the Future of OBM Transplantation, an Open-access Journal? In Your Opinion, What Challenges and Developments Can We Expect to See in the Next Few Years in This Field?
There are no doubts that open-access journals are growing both in number and in quality. Among the strengths of this type of journals are the very fast response times and the particular attention given to authors. Among the risks there is, of course, that their continuous increase forces publishers to reduce the standard of selection of manuscripts to guarantee an adequate flow of new papers to publish. Emblematic is the case of the recent COVID-19 pandemic where the enormous amount of work published in a very short time has given visibility to many low-quality manuscripts reporting scientific messages highly questionable.
It is therefore important that Editors strive to maintain high quality standards of the manuscripts that are accepted for publication carefully selecting the reviewers selected as evaluators. Interesting is the increasing attention that is paid to the peer review process with the development of platforms such as Publons and Reviewer Credits that were born and are increasingly developing precisely with the aim of guaranteeing Editors the possibility of an adequate selection of competent and trained reviewers.
