UpFront

Welcome to the January 2026 issue of Frontline Gastroenterology (FG) and Happy New Year 2026! I am pleased to report it has been a busy few weeks for the journal and it has been promoted both on a national and international stage, spreading the reach of FG far and wide. At the start of October 2025, I was invited to present some of the highlights from FG at the British Association for the Study of the Liver (BASL) 2025 conference in Belfast in light of our recent affiliation with the society. This, I am pleased to report, was very warmly received and I am again very grateful for the invitation from the outgoing President of BASL, Dr Tim Cross and the organising committee (figure 1). Collectively, we were all delighted by the reception the BASL Special Issue also received online at the same time. Following this visit to Belfast, it was fantastic to be warmly welcomed at the Indian Society of Gastroenterology (ISG) Tamil Nadu Midterm 2025 meeting, held in the Christian Medical Centre (CMC), Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India. The event was hosted by one of our superb FG Hepatology Associate Editors, Professor CE Eapen and his excellent team at CMC. I was honoured to deliver the ‘Drs Minnie and VI Mathan oration’ lecture (figure 2) as a visiting guest. Dr VI Mathan established the Division of Gastrointestinal (GI) Sciences at CMC Vellore. Before retirement, he co-founded and led the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratories in CMC specifically for research into Tropical Sprue—publishing their work in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, GUT and Gastroenterology among many other publications. His wife, Dr Minnie Mathan, is a GI pathologist who focused on electron microscopy and was also a formidable academic who was widely published. It was fantastic to meet both of them at the impressive new Ranipet Campus, which, along with the old CMC campus site, serves thousands of patients from all parts of India on a daily basis—with some patients travelling over 1000 kilometres to receive care there. It was very clear to me how hard the team at CMC worked to serve their population and how eclectic and diverse the clinical presentations patients often presented to the GI unit with. From a ‘frontline’ perspective, I felt there was much that could be learned from the GI clinicians and the way their services were structured—from the way endoscopy was delivered through to the pragmatic approach of clinicians to the care of patients who cannot afford the most advanced care available in western countries, but are offered care that does provide benefit to a large number of patients on a population-based level. You will see an example of this care in this issue in the article describing the use of therapeutic plasma exchange (PLEX) in severe alcohol-associated hepatitis (AAH)-related acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) which was produced by the Tamil Nadu ISG research network. This is therefore my ‘Editor’s Choice’ for this issue. I have chosen to showcase this work as an example of the power of frontline clinical research and the potential impact it can have in the most challenging and demanding of clinician environments.