Key Dates
6 May 2008
Notification of Acceptances
26 May 2008
Early Registration Cut-off Date
9 June 2008
Late breaking Abstract Submission Date
2 July 2008
Pre & Post Congress Tours
2 July 2008
Social Program Bookings
2 July 2008
Congress Day Tours
9 July 2008
Accommodation Bookings
9 July 2008
Accommodation Deposit deadline
9-10 August 2008
Postgraduate Weekend Courses
10-14 August 2008
Congress Opens
With thanks to
Prof. David K. C. Cooper, MD, PhD, FRCS
Since early 2004, David Cooper has been director of the xenotransplantation research group at the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he is a Professor of Surgery.
He was born and educated in the UK, and then spent 17 years as a cardiac transplant surgeon. He has been active in xenotransplantation research for 27 years.
He was the Founding Honorary Secretary of the International Xenotransplantation Association in 1997, and it's President in 1999-2001. From 2001-7, he was the Editor-in-chief of the Association's official journal, Xenotransplantation.
Assoc. Prof. Peter Cowan
Peter Cowan received his PhD in microbial genetic engineering from the University of Melbourne and worked in the biotechnology industry before joining the xenotransplantation program headed by Professor Tony d'Apice at St. Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne.
He is the Chief Scientist in the Immunology Research Centre at St. Vincent's and is an Associate Professor of the Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne.
He is a member of the Council of the International Xenotransplantation Association, Honorary Secretary of the Transplantation Society of Australia and New Zealand, and a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Xenotransplantation.
He has been an invited speaker at 4 international transplantation meetings since 2001 and has published more than 65 papers in scientific journals since 1996. His research interests in xenotransplantation include the immunobiology of rejection, genetic manipulation of the porcine donor, and dysregulation of coagulation in the xenograft setting.
Dr Kazuhiko Yamada, MD, PhD.
Kazuhiko Yamada is an Associate Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School and Head of the Organ Transplantation Tolerance and Xenotransplantation Laboratory, Transplantation Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital.
He obtained his medical degree from Nippon Medical School, Japan, in 1986. After he qualified as a board certified urologist in Japan, he joined the Transplantation Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital as a research fellow in late 1993. He became a Group Leader in the Miniature Swine Transplantation Section and an Instructor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 1998. He was promoted to Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 2000 and to Associate Professor of Surgery in 2004.
Dr. Yamada's current research interests focus on finding new means, especially using the thymus, for inducing tolerance to allogeneic and xenogeneic organ transplants in preclinical large animal models. He has developed innovative procedures to transplant thymus or islets as a vascularized graft, a so-called vascularized thymic lobe (VTL) or islet-kidney (I-K) or thymo-islet-kidney (TIK). Utilizing newly established techniques, he has reported that vascularization permits the thymus and islets to function immediately after transplantation and induce transplant tolerance in MGH-miniature swine. He has extended his strategies to xenotransplantation, and demonstrated longer than 80 days survival of life-supporting xenogeneic renal grafts with normal creatinine levels in baboons using GalT-KO pig kidneys co-transplanted with vascularized thymic grafts.
Return to the State of The Art Program
