AST Presents 2020 Innovation Award
Saturday, March 7, 2020
On March 7, 2020, the American Society of Transplantation proudly presented the AST Innovation Award to Dr. Peter Reese and Dr. David Goldberg and the THINKER project, at the Cutting Edge of Transplantation (CEoT) meeting in Phoenix, AZ.
Optimizing the use of organs from HCV-infected donors at a time when there have been so many potential donors with untreated hepatitis C is one of the biggest, most immediate opportunities to bring transplant’s benefits to more patients. Dr. Reese and Dr. Goldberg, along with their team of collaborators including the Gift of Life Donor Program in Philadelphia, led the way showing how HCV-infected organs could be transplanted safely into uninfected recipients. This group first proposed pilot kidney transplant trials in 2015, and published and presented seminal results in 2017 and 2018. Since then, this work has been adopted by a number of transplant centers worldwide and adapted to cardiac and lung transplantation by UPENN and many other centers. It is rare to see such innovative work by a multidisciplinary team make such rapid progress, with effective and efficient dissemination to so many other centers.
The AST Innovation Award seeks to recognize, reward, and drive innovative and novel strategies to advance the field of transplantation.