SOTA 03: Induction Immunosuppression
Chair:
Gabriel Danovitch
Bio coming soon
Chair:
Denis Glotz
Bio coming soon.
Speakers:
Flavio Vincenti
Dr. Vincenti completed his medical training, internship and residency at the American University Medical Center, Beirut, Lebanon. He then did a two-year nephrology fellowship at Emory University School of Medicine. He came to the University of California, San Francisco in July of 1975 for a transplant nephrology fellowship and has been on the staff of the Kidney Transplant Service at UCSF since 1976. He is board certified in internal medicine and nephrology.
Dr. Vincenti is a member of the Steering Committee of the Immune Tolerance Network. In addition he is an associate editor of Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology and is on the editorial board of Transplantation. Dr. Vincenti is widely published and has authored or co-authored over 170 articles on transplantation. Dr. Vincenti was the primary investigator of an article published in 1978 in the New England Journal of Medicine concerning the important role of blood transfusions in improving the outcome following kidney transplantation. He also reported a series of articles on the complications of transplantation including of aseptic necrosis and recurrent diseases in renal allografts. He has contributed to the understanding of the incidence and risk of recurrence of focal glomerulosclerosis as well as its outcome after transplantation. In the 1990s, Dr. Vincenti has participated in a number of important multicenter clinical trials including studies with OKT3, tacrolimus, daclizumab, basiliximab, HuM291, anti-CD80/86 monoclonal antibodies, efalizumab, anti-CD154, tasocitinib and belatacept. Dr. Vincenti was honored by the National Kidney Foundation of Northern California on May 20, 2000 for his contributions to transplantation and treatment of renal failure. He was the recipient of the AST 2002 Novartis Clinical Science Award.
Dr. Vincenti has been an active member of the American Society of Transplantation and helped establish the clinical trials committee, which he chaired from 2002-2004; he then chaired the development committee from 2004-2006. He has been on board of the American Society of Transplantation since 2003 and has served as its president (2007-2008).
Nader Najafian
It has always been my goal to become a first rate physician-scientist, to better enable me to use exciting laboratory research for the benefit of my patients. As I will outline below, I believe I have made great progress to realize this dream.
My contributions to the field of immunology are numerous. As postdoctoral fellow, I have been involved in several projects in the field of autoimmunity and transplant immunobiology. One area of interest has been to study the role of CD28 costimulatory pathway-independent induction of disease in a mouse model of autoimmunity. Another area has been to study the role of STAT4 and STAT6 genes in the induction of disease in the same model. Both these projects resulted in 2 publications in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. During my fellowship, I have taken the lead in the very important field of development of immune monitoring assays for kidney transplant patients using ELISPOT technology. This work has also resulted in 2 important publications in the Journal of American Society of Nephrology. As Instructor of Medicine, I continued to contribute to the field of autoimmunity by studying the role of regulatory CD8 T cells in controlling autoimmune responses, a very important work that was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Another area of investigation is the role of novel negative costimulatory molecules such as CTLA4 and PD1 in transplantation rejection and tolerance induction. The results of this work have been recently published in two manuscripts in the Journal of Immunology and also build the foundations for my recently approved grant from the American Heart Association and the NIH KO8 award.
The other major focus of my work involves the role of regulatory CD4+CD25+ T cells in kidney transplant recipients. Strategies have been developed to expand these regulatory T cells ex vivo with the goal of exploiting them for re-infusion to induce tolerance. My laboratory is also continuing the work in the development of assays to monitor immune status of transplant patients. Such assays are essential to guide the immunosuppressive management of patients and to understand tolerance in humans. These projects are currently funded by the NIH (CTOT-2, UO1 AI070107) and Immune Tolerance Network. I am one of first investigators worldwide studying the role of the novel costimulatory molecules Tim-1-Tim-4 and Tim-3-galectin 9 in transplantation and autoimmunity. The work in autoimmunity has resulted in a published paper in the Journal of Experimental Medicine in 2007. The transplantation results were reported in a manuscript published in Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2008. Overall, my work is highly focused on understanding mechanisms of immune regulation of auto- and allo- immune responses in animals and humans. In addition, I have had the opportunity and continue to mentor several research fellows at the Transplantation Research Center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Children Hospital.
I currently attend on the inpatient Transplant Nephrology Service at BWH, where my responsibilities include teaching of renal fellows, medical interns and residents, and medical students. Furthermore, my clinical responsibilities also include a busy weekly half day renal transplant clinic at BWH. I also participate in the formal teaching of first year fellows by giving several lectures each year.
Daniel Abramowicz
Daniel Abramowicz, MD, PhD, is professor of nephrology and director of the renal transplantation program at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium where more than 2500 renal transplantation have been performed.
Dr. Abramowicz has completed a doctoral thesis in 1994, on "Induction of transplantation tolerance in mice". He is author and co-author of articles dealing mainly with immunosuppressive regimens in renal transplantation, that have been published among others in Transplantation, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, American Journal of Transplantation, and Kidney International.
Dr. Abramowicz is Subject Editor for Transplantation for Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantation and is member of the editorial board of Transplantation. He was a member of the expert group that issued the European Best Practice Guidelines on renal transplantation in 2000 and 2002. He now chairs a working party commisionned by the European Renal Best Practice advisory board to update the European guidelines on renal transplantation.
Lionel Rostaing
Professor Rostaing received his MD and graduated in Nephrology from Toulouse University Medical School in 1988. In 1989 he graduated in Immunology at Aix-Marseille University Medical School.
During this period Professor Rostaing completed two overseas fellowships, one at the Collaborative Transplant Study in Heidelberg, Germany and one at the UK Transplant Services in Bristol.In 1990 he returned to Toulouse University Hospital, first as Assistant Physician in Clinical Hematology and later as Assistant Physician in Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantation. From 1994 to 1998 he worked as a Consultant in the Multi-organ Transplant Service at the Hospital, and became Professor of Nephrology in 1999. He obtained his PhD from Toulouse University in 2000.Professor Rostaing’s main fields of clinical and basic research include viral infections in dialysis and in organ transplant patients, particularly hepatitis C and E viruses infection in dialysis and transplant patients; cytomegalovirus infection and disease after kidney and liver transplants; hepatitis E after organ transplantation; anemia after kidney transplantation and after liver transplantation; the pharmacodynamic effects of immunosuppressants; and the assessment of intracytoplasmic cytokines by means of flow cytometry and its relevance to alloreactivity in kidney transplant recipients and to biocompatibility in hemodialysis patients. He has authored or co-authored more than 290 peer-reviewed articles referenced in PubMed.
Professor Rostaing is a member of several professional and scientific organizations including the French Society of Nephrology, the International Society of Nephrology, the European Society of Nephrology, Dialysis, and Transplantation, the European Society of Transplantation, the American Society of Nephrology, and the American Society of Transplantation