Chief resident Steven Kim, MD, has received the 2020 American Society of Transplant Surgeons-Veloxis Fellowship in Transplantation Grant. The award will fund the research Dr. Kim will conduct during his upcoming two-year abdominal organ transplant surgery fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. His research mentor will be Dixon Kaufman, MD, PhD, chair of the Division of Transplantation at UW.
This is the third time the quality of Dr. Kim's research has been recognized by the ASTS. As a medical student, Dr. Kim's work in the laboratory of Allan Kirk, MD, PhD, former scientific director of the Emory Transplant Center, was funded by the 2012 ASTS Presidential Student Mentor Grant. In 2015, an ASTS Resident Scientist Scholarship funded his two-year research sabbatical in the laboratory of Emory transplant surgeon-scientist Andrew Adams, MD, PhD, during which Dr. Kim led a series of non-human primate studies designed to translate strategies involving mesenchymal stromal cells to clinical application. He presented at numerous national and international meetings, received the American Journal of Transplantation's award for Best Translational Science Article of 2017, and accomplished the longest reported surviving pig-to-primate xenotransplant to date.
With the ASTS Fellowship Grant, Dr. Kim will examine tolerance induction in a non-human primate renal transplant model using a novel protocol that employs total lymphoid irradiation and donor-derived hematopoietic stem cell infusions with belatacept adjuvant therapy. This approach has demonstrated efficacy in establishing chimerism, an immune environment in which graft function is protected without the need for immunosuppression. Dr. Kim hopes to gain a more thorough understanding of the mechanisms of how this process confers protective immunity.
In this study model, Dr. Kim hypothesizes that the adjuvant use of costimulatory blockade—an immunosuppressive strategy that interferes with the ability of T cells to become fully activated—contributes to more effective engraftment and sustained chimerism. He aims to gain more insight into why this combination of therapies appears to be beneficial in sustaining an immunoprotective setting, thereby contributing to the optimization of the protocol for achieving eventual tolerance induction in human allotransplantation.