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PubMed

Leslie S Kean, MD, PhD

Research

Dr. Kean's work at the Aflac Center has focused on understanding mechanisms leading to transplantation tolerance with the ultimate goal of translating knowledge of these mechanisms to clinical transplantation. Dr. Kean's work is focused on four specific question

1. In a highly immunologically active model of a non-malignant hematologic disease (sickle cell disease) what are the major barriers to the acquisition of transplantation tolerance?
2. How do natural killer cells impact the acquisition of transplantation tolerance, and can control of natural-killer alloreactivity produce transplantation tolerance?
3. In the non-human primate model, what are the major barriers to the acquisition of transplantation tolerance, and can we combine blockade of the costimulation pathway with adoptive cellular therapies to achieve robust donor-specific tolerance?
4. During bone marrow transplantation in a rhesus macaque model, what are the barriers to tolerance that result in graft-versus host disease, and can these be overcome by costimulation-blockade based immunomodulation strategy?

Dr. Kean currently holds a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a K08 Clinician Scientist Award from the NIH, and is the Principal Investigator on one of two projects focused on primate transplantation tolerance funded by a NIH U19 Cooperative Group award. She also has funding from Children's for her novel model of graft-versus-host disease in a non-human primate model, the first of its kind in the world.