Tatsuo Kawai MD, PhD

Tatsuo Kawai MD, PhD is Professor of Surgery Harvard Medical School and A. Benedict Cosimi Chair in Transplant Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Surgical Director of living donor transplantation and the dialysis access program. He specializes in kidney, pancreas and liver transplantation as well as hemodialysis access surgery. He received his M.D. from Nihon University School of Medicine and Ph.D. from Tokyo Women’s Medical University, Tokyo, Japan. He completed surgical residency at Tokyo Women’s Medical University and clinical fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.

His clinical and research interests are primarily focused on development of methods to induce immunological tolerance in organ/cell transplantation. He was the first to report a consistent model for induction of renal allograft tolerance in nonhuman primates through a mixed chimerism approach. This and subsequent pre-clinical reports have extended this approach to the world’s first clinical trials for induction of renal allograft tolerance in HLA mismatched kidney transplantation. This is a seminal achievement of a clinical protocol leading to the first reproducibly successful induction of renal allograft tolerance in humans and was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2008 and 2013. He was awarded the Martin Research Prize at MGH in 2009 and the New Key Opinion Leader Award by the Transplantation Society in 2010 for this work.