The CCTI Lands Four Nelson Family Transplant Innovation Awards

Four of this year’s Nelson Family Transplant Innovation Awards Program’s Fellowship Awards went to CCTI members! Established in 2020, the Nelson Awards support basic and translational research in transplantation. The program is designed to support new, innovative research with the potential to yield advances in immune tolerance, organ availability, mechanisms of graft loss, and pediatric transplantation.
Proposal applications were submitted in December 2023 and reviewed by our scientific advisory panel in February 2024. This is the fourth year granting Nelson Fellowship Awards, and we are excited to be welcoming three new postdoctoral trainees into the program.
 

The 2024 CCTI Awardees are:

Ishit Chauhan, MD, who will define the use of intra-bone bone marrow transplantation to induce tolerance in pig-to-baboon islet-kidney xenotransplantation as a pre-clinical model to cure diabetic end stage renal disease.

Muhammed E. Gunes, MD, who will be exploring the thymus transplantation with delayed kidney transplantation to optimize the development of cross-species tolerance in a pig-to-baboon xenotransplant model.

Mert R. Gulsen, MD, who will be defining the mechanisms of B cell tolerance via mixed xenogeneic chimerism in a humanized mouse model.

Sho Fujiwara, MD, PhD, MPH, who will be developing a large animal liver xenotransplantation model.

Also a 2024 Awardee is Bing Chen, MD, PhD, who will be investigating the development of an immunological toolset as biomarkers or predictors of rejection after human intestinal transplantation.

The research funded by this year’s awards has the potential to answer some of the most pressing questions our clinicians, and their patients, face—from children to adults, across many organ areas. This wide scope is a credit to the Nelson family’s vision to create an awards program that advances emerging research and investigators across our field. Their generosity is already helping these investigations reach their potential, and we look forward to seeing where science takes us next.