Events

Dr. Reese will discuss ethical principles in decision-making about organ acceptance for patients with end-stage organ disease who desire organ transplantation. He will describe the intersection of ethical and operational problems that exist both at the bedside with individual patients and at the population health level for policy-makers and regulatory agencies. His talk will focus on recent and future real-world challenges situated in the examples of 1) human organ transplants that present the risk of disease transmission and 2) porcine donor transplants that present risks of rejection and death.

Peter Reese, MD, PhD is Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on: a) developing effective strategies to increase access to solid organ transplantation, b) improving the process of selecting and caring for living kidney donors, c) determining outcomes of health policies on vulnerable populations with renal disease, including the elderly, d) testing strategies to improve important health behaviors such as medication adherence, and e) transplant ethics. He is a past chair of the Ethics Committee for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which oversees organ allocation and transplant regulation in the US, and a Greenwall Scholar. His current work includes leading pioneering trials to transplant organs from deceased donors with hepatitis C virus and, more recently, working to safely integrate the use of genetically-modified porcine organs into the care of patients with end-stage organ disease.