Expanding the Post-Transplant Toolkit with the MMDx® Heart and Lung Tests Industry Symposium Session

Juan C. Alejos, MD, currently serves as the Medical Director of the Pediatric Heart Transplant/Cardiomyopathy Program at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital. He also started and is the Director of the Pediatric Pulmonary Hypertension program and is a Clinical Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Pediatric Cardiology. He is currently the Vice Chair of JEDI for the Department of Pediatrics.

Dr. Alejos received his medical degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and completed an internship, residency, and fellowship at the UCLA Medical Center. His areas of research interest include the use of pulmonary vasodilator therapies in congenital heart disease, especially those with single ventricle physiology. He is also active in research involving the treatment of cardiomyopathy and outcomes research pertaining to pediatric cardiac transplantation.

Dr. Alejos is also the President and Founder of Hearts with Hope Foundation. Hearts with Hope is nonprofit foundation founded in 2005 that sends medical teams to underserved countries to provide medical and humanitarian support to children with congenital heart disease. The medical teams train the country’s physicians on procedures and surgeries that can vastly improve a child’s quality of life. All medical equipment and services are provided at no cost to the child’s family.

Glen Westall is currently Professor at Monash University Medical School and Consultant Chest Physician at the Lung Transplant Unit, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Westall received his undergraduate medical training at King’s College Medical School in London, UK, before training in general and respiratory medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London and Alfred Hospital. He runs NHMRC-funded translational research programs in the fields of lung fibrosis and lung transplantation. Dr. Westall’s clinical interests include advanced lung disease, pulmonary fibrosis, and lung transplantation. He is physician-in-charge of the Australian paediatric lung transplant program that is based in Melbourne.

Dr. Philip F. Halloran is a clinician-scientist whose research focus is organ transplantation and organ diseases, at the clinical and basic levels. He received his MD and internal medicine/nephrology (FRCPC) from the University of Toronto and his PhD from the University of London. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto before joining the University of Alberta, where he was director of the division of nephrology and transplantation for 15 years. Dr Halloran then developed the Alberta Transplant Applied Genomics Centre (ATAGC), now the world’s leading centre for molecular studies of organ transplants, based on human biopsies and experimental models. He has published 387 peer reviewed papers.

His research has focussed on the mechanisms of tissue injury and inflammation, particularly at the level of changes in gene expression, using organ transplants as the principal model. A particular interest has been antibody-mediated kidney rejection, now recognized as the leading cause of late kidney transplant loss. He has also been an investigator in many clinical trials of immunosuppressive agents. His recent focus has been to develop diagnostic applications of the molecular changes in human diseases, and their relationship to the clinical and histologic findings. The goal is to understand human disease states, learning the lessons in organ transplant biopsies and applying those lessons in primary organ diseases. A key element in this is the development of a Molecular Microscope^® Diagnostic System (MMDx) that uses microarrays to read human biopsies.

He was the founding editor-in-chief of the world’s leading transplantation journal, the American Journal of Transplantation, with the editorial office at the U of A from 2000 to 2010. He was also the founding Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Roche Organ Transplant Research Foundation, a Swiss based charity. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation. He received the 2016 Prix Galien Canada Research Award, 2016 Doctor Honoris Causa Award presented by the Faculté de médecine de l’Université de Paris Descartes, the 2018 J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Alberta, and the 2018 Czech Transplant Foundation Annual Award. He has trained and mentored many clinician-scientists who are now key opinion leaders internationally.