Abe Matar and Brendan Lovasik recognized with ATC Young Investigator Awards
FEBRUARY 2020
Abe Matar, MD, and Brendan Lovasik, MD, general surgery residents currently working on research sabbatical in the transplant immunology laboratory of transplant surgeon-scientist Andrew Adams, MD, PhD, were each selected for Young Investigator Travel Awards for the 2020 American Transplant Congress, to be held in Philadelphia in May 2020.
For two young investigators working in the same lab to be selected for this award is a tribute to the impactful basic and translational science being done in Dr. Adams' transplant immunology lab, which focuses on therapeutics, diagnostics, xenotransplantation, and outcomes research.
ATC Young Investigator Awards are designed to recognize young researchers' outstanding abstract submissions and to help offset the expense of attending the congress, which is the joint annual meeting of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS) and the American Society of Transplantation (AST) that provides the most current information in the field of transplant science.
Dr. Matar's abstract describes the application of NOTCH receptor/ligand interactions to abrogate costimulation-resistant rejection as a method of prolonging allograft survival and inducing immunological tolerance, while Dr. Lovasik's project evaluated the effect of CD20+ B cell depletion and reemerging B cell phenotypes in pig-to-nonhuman primate xenotransplantation as a potential avenue to developing the use of xenotransplantation as a mode of kidney transplant in humans.