Xenotransplantation: Updates on Animal-to-Human Transplants

Hot Topics in Kidney Health

On today's special episode of Hot Topics and Kidney Health we're sharing audio from a recent webinar hosted by National Kidney Foundation on kidney xenotransplantation. Stay tuned to hear from the experts and learn about the latest updates on animal-to-human transplantation.

Dr. Tatsuo Kawai is a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and the A. Benedict Cosimi Chair in Transplant Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also director of the Legorreta Center for Clinical Transplantation Tolerance. He was awarded the Martin Research Prize at MGH in 2009 and the New Key Opinion Leader Award by the Transplantation Society in 2010 for this work. In the field of xenotransplantation, he has collaborated extensively with eGenesis over the past five years, achieving over two years of survival for genetically edited kidney xenografts in nonhuman primates, which was published in Nature in 2023. In March 2024, he successfully performed the world first kidney xenotransplantation from the pig with 69 genomic edits in a living patient with end stage renal disease.

Vineeta Kumar MD, FAST, FASN is the lead nephrologist for the Living Kidney Donor and Incompatible Kidney Transplant programs at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. She is an expert in kidney transplantation, living kidney donation, incompatible kidney transplant, kidney paired donation and cardiovascular outcomes after kidney transplantation.

Peter Reese, MD, PhD, is an NIH-funded transplant nephrologist and epidemiologist. His research focuses on: a) developing effective strategies to increase access to solid organ transplantation; b) improving the process of selecting and caring for living kidney donors; c) determining outcomes of health policies on vulnerable populations with renal disease, including the elderly; d) testing strategies to improve important health behaviors such as medication adherence; and e) transplant ethics. He was a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, was elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and was a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in bioethics. He is a past chair of the Ethics Committee for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which oversees organ allocation and transplant regulation in the US, and is an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. He co-led the THINKER, USHER, MYTHIC, and SHELTER trials involving transplanting HCV-infected donor organs into uninfected recipients. His work has been generously funded by foundations and the NIH, including a K-24 to support mentoring.

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