• Professor of Medicine and Surgery
• Director of Translational Medicine, Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute

MD (1991), University of Padua, Italy

Dr. Gallon is a physician‐scientist whose research interests include the immunobiology of solid organ rejection, immunomodulation of allo-response, transplant tolerance, and prevention or mitigation of ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) at the time of transplantation. His current collaborative work with SQI is focused on mitigation of IRI. 

IRI evokes major intra-graft inflammatory immune responses that augment graft immunogenicity, increase the rate of allograft rejection, and negatively impact solid organ transplantation outcomes. Reducing the deleterious effects of IRI-induced inflammatory responses has even greater clinical implications, given the common utilization of marginal kidneys to address the shortage of organs. Despite multiple agents being tested, there are no currently approved therapies for the prevention or treatment of IRI. Studies in animals have shown that injections of regulatory T cells (Tregs) can mitigate inflammatory responses and induce immunologic tolerance. For a Treg therapy to be effective, the cells must migrate to the transplant site. Gallon is working with members of SQI and the Comprehensive Transplant Center to develop nanofiber-coated Tregs and test whether they are more effective than uncoated Tregs in mitigating IRI in mouse models of kidney injury. The final goal of this project is to evaluate whether this technology prevents IRI in humans.