Dr. Uygun received his BSc and MSc from Bogazici University and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Wayne State University.  He joined the Institute in 2006 as a postdoctoral fellow, and was promoted to Instructor in Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 2008 and Assistant Professor at HMS in 2011. His work at the Institute pioneers a unique cross-section of transplantation and systems engineering, applying dynamic modeling to development of extracorporeal organ perfusion. He is known internationally for his work on perfusion of discarded human livers, proof-of-concept of an index of transplant viability, supercooled organ preservation to triple storage duration, as well as whole-organ tissue engineering and metabolomics in liver transplantation.  These projects are funded by the NIH, NSF and DOD among others. His more than 40 publications span American Journal of Transplantation, Nature Medicine, Technology and PLOS One, have been cited over a 1,000 times and carried by the BBC, NY Times, Scientific American, FoxNews, Der Spiegel, IFLScience and New Scientist among others.

Dr. Uygun serves as the Deputy Director of Research at Shriners Boston Hospital, is the founding Director of Cell Resource Core at MGH, and the Director of the Organ Reengineering Lab at the Institute.  In addition, he is a founder of Organ Solutions LLC, a start-up aiming to commercialize several technologies developed by Dr. Uygun and his colleagues at the Institute. He’s served as a reviewer at Federal panels in the US and EU.

Representative publications

Berendsen TA, Bruinsma B, Puts CF, Saeidi N, Usta OB, Uygun BE, Izamis M-L, Toner M, Yarmush ML, Uygun K. Successful Supercooled Liver Storage for 4 Days. Nature Medicine, epub June 29, 2014.

Bruinsma B, Yeh H, Ozer S, Martins P, Farmer A, Wu W, et al. Subnormothermic Machine Perfusion for ex vivo Preservation and Recovery of the Human Liver for Transplantation. American Journal of Transplantation. 2014 Jun; 14(6):1400-9. PubMed PMID: 24758155

Perk S, Izamis M-L, Tolboom H, Uygun B, Berthiaume F, Yarmush ML, et al. A Metabolic Index of Ischemic Injury for Perfusion-Recovery of Cadaveric Rat Livers. PLOS One. 2011 Dec; 6(12):e28518. PubMed PMID: 22194843; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3237452

Uygun BE, Soto-Gutierrez A, Yagi H, Izamis ML, Guzzardi MA, Shulman CJ, et al. Organ Re-Engineering: Development of a Transplantable Recellularized Liver Graft using Decellularized Liver Matrix. Nature Medicine. 2010 Jul; 16(7):814-20. PubMed PMID: 20543851; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2930603

Information

M. Korkut Uygun, Ph.D.
Massachusetts General Hospital
Center for Engineering in Medicine – Rm 220
51 Blossom St
Boston MA 02114

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