ASTS-Approved Multiorgan Transplantation Fellowship

Kidney/Pancreas Transplantation Program

The Kidney/Pancreas Transplant Service at Mount Sinai, situated within the Transplantation Institute, is a major referral center in New York for patients with Type I and Type II diabetes and renal insufficiency. Approximately 500 patients are referred to the unit each year for consideration for work-up and transplantation. Over 110 kidney transplants and approximately 12 pancreas transplants are currently performed annually. These numbers have increased over 10 percent each year for the last few years. In addition, a number of other operative procedures including vascular access and general surgery procedures, as well as living donor nephrectomies, are performed by the service. Currently 50-60 percent of the kidney transplants are done as living donor kidney transplants, and over 95 percent of those donors are performed by hand-assisted laparascopic surgery by the Division of Laparoscopic Surgery in the Department of Surgery.

The surgical chief of the unit is Jonathan Bromberg, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Surgery, Immunobiology, and Gene and Cell Medicine. Dr. Bromberg is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, completed surgical residency at the University of Washington, and transplant fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been at Mount Sinai since 1999. During that time the Kidney/Pancreas Transplant Program has more than doubled in size and continues in its growth rate. Dr. Bromberg’s major academic interests are in basic cellular and molecular immunobiology and transplantation tolerance. His laboratory is currently funded by NIH, JDFI, and foundation grants to investigate immune responses to alloantigen, T cell trafficking, IL-10, gene transfer, and pancreatic beta cells.

Barbara Murphy, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine and Medical Director of the Kidney/Pancreas Transplant Unit has been at Mount Sinai since 1997. She is a graduate of the University of Dublin and completed her clinical and research transplant nephrology fellowships at Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School. Likewise, she maintains an active laboratory with interests in cellular and molecular immunobiology and tolerance to alloantigen. Drs. Murphy and Bromberg collaborate on projects dealing with chemokines and transplantation of pancreatic islets.

Additional faculty members in the Kidney/Pancreas Program include Scott Ames, M.D., Assistant Professor of Surgery, an experienced transplant surgeon with clinical interests in kidney and pancreas transplantation and vascular access. His clinical research topics include clinical care and outcomes in donor nephrectomies. Enver Akalin, M.D., completed medical school at Ege University in his native Turkey, clinical and basic science nephrology fellowships at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, and a transplant nephrology fellowship at Emory University. He has been at Mount Sinai since 2000 and has active funded research interests in the molecular analysis of acute and chronic transplant rejection with gene chip technology, and the use of IVIG in prophylaxis and treatment of humoral rejections. Vinita Sehgal, M.D., completed her medical school at Yale University and residency and fellowship at Columbia University. She is an experienced clinical transplant nephrologist who has been at Mount Sinai since 2000. Bernd Schroppel, M.D., and Graciela deBoccardo are two new faculty members who just joined the Institute.

The transplant fellows rotate on the Kidney/Pancreas Transplant service is a core part of the training program. While on service the fellows are primarily responsible for assisting in all of the surgeries, for care of in-house postsurgical patients, as well as for seeing new and follow-up patients in the outpatient clinics. Second-year Mount Sinai surgical residents also rotate on the service along with junior nephrology fellows and senior transplant nephrology fellows who share with the surgery fellows primary responsibility for both in-house and clinic patients.