SOTA 10: Maintenance Immunosuppression
Chair:
Bernard Charpentier
Prof. B. Charpentier received his MD and graduated in Nephrology from Paris University School of Medicine in 1975. He is full Professor in Medicine in Paris-Sud University since 1983 and Head of the Department of Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantations in the University Hospital of Bicêtre since 1992. He was Director of several CNRS-INSERM research units devoted to Immunology and Immunoregulation (UPR CNRS 277-420; INSERM U542-1014 ). He is (co)author of more than 400 pubmed-indexed publications on Nephrology and Transplantation.
He was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Paris-Sud ( 1998-2008 ), President of the French Medical Deans Council ( 2003-2008 ), President of the French Transplant Society and President of the European Society for Organ Transplantation ( ESOT ) ( 2005-2007 ).
His field of interest are mainly focused in transplantation medicine, basic immunology, immunoregulation and immunosuppressive drugs.
Chair:
Benedict Cosimi
A. Benedict Cosimi is the Claude E. Welch Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Chief Emeritus of the Transplantation Unit in the Department of Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. After graduating summa cum laude from Regis College in Denver, Dr. Cosimi earned his M.D. degree magna cum laude from the University of Colorado. He served his surgical residency at the MGH and trained in transplantation with both Dr. Thomas Starzl at Colorado and Paul S. Russell at the MGH.
Dr. Cosimi has demonstrated a life-long commitment to scientific advancement in the field of transplantation and surgery. He has had a special interest in highly selective suppression of transplant immunity, initially using antithymocyte globulin and then monoclonal antibodies. He was the first to demonstrate in 1980 the efficacy of OKT3 monoclonal antibody, a drug still used today, for treatment of allograft rejection. For these and his ongoing studies, he developed a non-human primate transplant model as a pre-clinical tool for testing a variety of new therapeutic regimens. He has trained over 35 fellows and many of the surgeons currently using this model in the U.S. Most recently, Dr. Cosimi's efforts have been directed towards defining an immunosuppressive approach that provides donor-specific tolerance of the transplant. These studies have resulted in long-term (over 15 years) allograft survival without the need for chronic immunosuppression in monkeys and now have been extended to the world's first trials in humans of tolerance induction.
Dr. Cosimi is on the Editorial Board of many prestigious surgical and transplantation journals and is the co-editor of the definitive textbook, Transplantation. He has published over 50 book chapters and more 360 peer-reviewed scientific reports. He is a member of many national and international surgical and transplantation societies and has held key executive council or committee positions in many of these. He has served as President of the New England Surgical Society, President of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons as well as President of the 2006 World Transplantation Congress which was held in Boston in July of 2006. He is also currently on the Scientific Advisory Boards for the American Liver Foundation, the Massachusetts Kidney Foundation, and several biotechnology research foundations.
Speakers:
Barry Donald Kahan, Ph.D., M.D.
Barry D. Kahan, Ph.D., M.D. served as Professor of Surgery and Director of the Division of Immunology and Organ Transplantation at The University of Texas Medical School and as Chief of the Organ Transplant Services at The Hermann Hospital for over 30 years since 1976 before his present Emeritus Director status. He received both his Ph.D. in physiology and his M.D. from The University of Chicago. Before his academic appointment at U.T., Dr. Kahan held Assistant and Associate Professor positions in the Departments of Physiology and Surgery at The Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago after completing his residency and internship in surgery at The Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He is certified by the American Board of Surgery and is a former President of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.
Dr. Kahan is Editor-in-Chief of Transplantation Proceedings, serves on the editorial boards of numerous scientific publications and has acted as a consultant for several national advisory committees, including the F.D.A. Advisory Committee on Anesthesia and Life Saving Drugs, as well as Chairman of the Immunology Study Section at N.I.H. and for the American Cancer Society. He served two terms on the Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Transplantation. One of the Top 100 Most Cited Researchers in the World (Clinical Medicine) according to the Institute for Scientific Information, Dr. Kahan has published more than 1,000 original research papers.
For more than three decades, Dr. Kahan has been actively engaged in the development of new immunosuppressive therapies to combat organ transplant rejection, playing a primary role for cyclosporine and sirolimus. He was the first researcher to administer sirolimus to humans in pivotal clinical Phase I, II, and III trials of the drug in renal transplantation, subsequently applying a mathematical model, the median effect equation, to document synergy with cyclosporine in humans. Following FDA approval of sirolimus, Dr. Kahan identified FTY720 as a new synergistic agent with the cyclosporine-sirolimus regimen, and served as the lead investigator in the Phase I trials of multiple doses of this new agent. His recent investigations have focused on synthetic compounds that disrupt selectin-mediated cell surface interactions, that antagonize Janus kinase 3 and that agonize sphingosine-1-phosphate receptors.
Teun van Gelder MD, PhD.
Dr. Teun van Gelder is an internist-nephrologist and clinical pharmacologist in the Departments of Hospital Pharmacy and Internal Medicine at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He was trained in internal medicine and nephrology at the Erasmus Medical Center, and completed his thesis in 1996 on the use of anti-interleukin-2 receptor monoclonal antibodies in solid organ transplantation. As a post-doctoral scientist, he worked in the Transplantation Immunology Laboratory of Dr. Randall E. Morris at Stanford University (1998-2000), and was awarded the Young Investigator Award from the American Society for Transplantation for his work during this time. Dr. van Gelder’s current research at the Erasmus Medical Center is focused on clinical pharmacology and therapeutic drug monitoring.
Allan Kirk
Allan D. Kirk received his M.D. from Duke University in 1987 and completed his Ph.D. in Immunology under the mentorship of Olivera Finn in 1992. He completed his General Surgery Residency at Duke in 1995 and his multi-organ transplantation fellowship at the University of Wisconsin in 1997. He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Surgery and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. From 1997 through 2001 he served in the United States Navy where he reached the rank of Commander and Principal Investigator at the Naval Medical Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1999, he became the inaugural Chief of the NIH intramural Solid Organ Transplant Program, and subsequently served as a Senior Investigator and Chief of the NIDDK Transplantation Branch. During this time he also served as Chair of the Clinical Center Surgical Administration Committee.
In 2007 Dr. Kirk joined the faculty at Emory University as Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics, and Scientific Director of the Emory Transplant Center. He is now Vice Chair for Research of the Emory Department of Surgery. Dr. Kirk’s primary interests lie in the development and implementation of novel immunomodulatory strategies. He has particular interest in finding ways to minimize the need for long-term immunosuppression and the adaptation of immunosuppressive strategies to novel applications such as composite tissue transplantation and other clinical applications. He has been the Principal Investigator on numerous clinical trials including early translational studies with alemtuzumab and costimulation blockade based therapies. His bibliography contains over 180 scientific manuscripts and book chapters. He is an elected member of the Society of University Surgeons and the American Society of Clinical Investigation. In 2006, he was the recipient of the AST/Roche Clinical Science Investigator Award. Dr. Kirk has been an active member of the American Society of Transplantation (AST), the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, the Transplantation Society, and the American Association of Immunologists. He has served on the AST Board of Directors and on the Board of Trustees for the Roche Organ Transplant Research Foundation. He has served on the Editorial Boards of the American Journal of Transplantation (AJT), Transplantation, Transplantation Immunology and Human Immunology, and most recently has been selected as the Editor-in-Chief of AJT.
Marcelo Cantarovich
Marcelo Cantarovich, MD, graduated in Medicine from University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1980. He worked as a transplant coordinator at Argentina Transplant (CUCAI) from 1977 to 1982. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine in Buenos Aires and a fellowship in nephrology and transplantation at Université Paris-Sud in Paris, France from 1984 to 1988. He is Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, McGill University; Medical Director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program and Associate Director of the Multi-Organ Transplant Program, Royal Victoria Hospital, McGill University Health Center, Montréal, Québec, Canada. His clinical interest is in multi-organ transplantation. His research focuses on immunopharmacology and on renal protection strategies in renal and non-renal transplant patients. He has published over 100 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Transplantation and Clinical Journal of the American Society of Transplantation. He has chaired the Clinical Trials Committee of the American Society of Transplantation in 2006, the 2007 Key Opinion leader symposium organized by The Transplantation Society in Montréal and the 2008 Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Society of Transplantation. Dr. M. Cantarovich is a member of the Council of The Transplantation Society and President of the Canadian Society of Transplantation (2010-2011).