NAME:
Chung-Gyu Park, MD, PhD
AFFILIATIONS:
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Department of Biomedical Sciences
Transplantation Research Institute
Seoul National University College of Medicine
Seoul, Republic of Korea
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Park is a Professor of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Seoul National University College of Medicine. He has worked in immune tolerance, transplantation immunology and exosome research. His research on xenotransplantation has been sponsored by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Korea, as the 15-year program of Xenotransplantation Research Center (XRC) through which he has contributed to the clinical realization of xenotransplantation. He served as a Councilor of Internation Xenotransplantation Association (2011-2015) and is serving as Associate editor of Xenotranplantation journal. As an immunologist he has served as the President of the Korean Association for Immunologists (2016-2017) and as a Vice President of Korean Association of Laboratory Animal Science (2019-2021). He has published over 170 literatures in SCI-indexed academic journals.
ABSTRACT
The current status and future perspectives of Xenotransplantation
Porcine organs could be one of the most promising alternative source enabling to overcome the organ supply shortage. In an effort to achieve clinical application of xenotransplantation, we have been working on porcine cornea and naked adult islet xenotransplantation in NHP model to get preclinical efficacy and safety data which could meet the requirements released from International Xenotransplantation Association (IXA) consensus statements on conditions for undertaking clinical trials of porcine cornea and islet xenotransplantation. We reported long-term survival of pig cornea and pancreatic islet graft in NHPs for longer than 6 months in 5 consecutive experiments with anti-CD154 monoclonal antibody-based immunosuppression (Am J Transplant. 2015;15:628-41, Am J Transplant. 2015;15:2837-50). In one monkey the islet graft survived over 960 days (Xenotransplantation. 2016 Jul;23(4):300-9). For the clinical translation, anti-CD154 sparing regimen should be developed. For cornea xenotransplantation, the regimen using clinically available immunosuppressants including anti-CD20 mAb combined with Tacrolimus showed long-term graft survival comparable to anti-CD154 based regimen. For islet xenotransplantation, Induction with ATG and short term Tacrolimus and maintenance with Sirolimus, JAK3 inhibitor, monthly and bi-monthly belimumab enabled long term control of diabetes in NHP (Xenotransplantation. 2020 Nov 6:e12659. doi: 10.1111/xen.12659). The clinical protocols have been developed based on these results from preclinical study. Currently, the protocols for clinical trial of porcine cornea and pancreatic islet xenotransplantation are being reviewed by the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety under the Law of Advanced Regenerative Medicine and Biopharmacology Act.