At its 2024 Awards Gala, held June 20, 2024, at The Plaza Hotel in New York City to honor kidney donors and the achievements of the American transplant industry, the National Kidney Registry presented the Terasaki Medical Innovation Award to Dr. Joe Leventhal.
The Terasaki Medical Innovation Award is given to an individual or organization that has invented, developed, or created breakthrough technologies in transplantation.
Dr. Joe Leventhal, the Surgical Director of the Kidney Transplant Program at Northwestern University, is a pioneer in the development of cell-based therapies to achieve tolerance induction in solid organ transplant recipients, allowing transplant patients to eliminate the need for immunosuppressive medications. He has personally completed the most successful unrelated kidney transplant tolerance cases in the world.
“We now have amassed the largest consecutive series of patients off immunosuppression,” said Dr. Leventhal in accepting the award. “The road to tolerance has been a challenging one, but I believe we are on the cusp of a new era of transplantation tolerance induction. I am very excited to be working with the NKR and ImmunoFree, building upon the work that we’ve done over the last two decades to bring tolerance to kidney transplant recipients from the bench to the bedside in the very near future.”
About the National Kidney Registry
The National Kidney Registry (www.kidneyregistry.org) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to save and improve the lives of people facing kidney failure by increasing the quality, speed, and number of living donor transplants while protecting all living donors.
About ImmunoFree
ImmunoFree (www.immunofree.com) was founded in 2023 to improve the lives of transplant patients by using new stem cell technology to eliminate the need for immunosuppressive medications.
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