BALTIMORE — Two Johns Hopkins Medicine surgeons will receive $21.4 million over the next two years to advance research needed to successfully transplant living cells, tissues and organs from animals to humans.
The scientists, Dr. Kazuhiko Yamada and Dr. Andrew Cameron, will receive the funding under two research agreements with the United Therapeutics Corp., a biotechnology company that focuses on projects meant to expand the availability of transplantable organs, Johns Hopkins Medicine said last week in a news release.
Over the next two years, Yamada and Cameron plan to advance the use of genetically modified pigs in human organ transplants, improving techniques already used in the approach to reduce the risk of organ rejection and failure and to increase the likelihood of a patient’s long-term survival.
