Organ transplantation is an
effective treatment for a variety of diseases including kidney
disease, liver disease, diabetes, heart disease, pulmonary disease,
and gastrointestinal defects. The field has made remarkable
strides in the last half-century, and the technical aspects of
transplantation have greatly improved such that today, they are a
relatively minor cause of graft and patient loss. However,
immunologic rejection of transplanted organs continues to be a
major cause of such loss.
In order to prevent the recipient body from rejecting the
transplanted organs, patients must receive 
immunosuppressive drugs to inhibit activity of the
immune system. Unfortunately, because these drugs are
non-specific, the suppressed immune system is more susceptible to
all kinds of infections and malignancies. There are also
other significant side-effects of many immunosuppressive drugs,
including high blood pressure, diabetes, and decrease in kidney
function. For these reasons, there is a great need for the
development of protocols to reliably achieve transplant-specific
tolerance, which would prevent rejection and obviate the need for
lifelong systemic immunosuppression. Providing anti-donor
specific immunosuppression (commonly called "allo-specific
transplant tolerance") without global immunosuppression is one of
the major goals of transplantation research.
The Transplantation Research Lab comprises both basic scientific research and clinical studies in an effort to find viable solutions to the complex problem of rejection in human organ transplantation.