Description of Research Expertise

James Markmann, M.D. is a board certified general surgeon with extensive specialty training in all areas of abdominal organ transplantation. He has a highly active clinical practice in liver, kidney and simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplantation. His special interests include: treatment of hepatobiliary malignancy, living-related and split liver transplantation, transplantation for Type I diabetes (pancreas and islet transplantation), and minimally invasive approaches to transplant surgery such as laparoscopic donor nephrectomy.

Dr. Markmann's lab works on basic Transplantation Immunology and has three general areas of interest: First, we are working on gene based strategies to improve graft survival. We have constructed viral vectors encoding immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory moelcules to impact the host response to allografts. Second, we have focused on characterization of a particular population of immunoregulatory T cells that are know to be critical for self-tolerance as a means to induce tolerance to an allograft. Finally, we have recently begun clinical trials of human isolated islet transplantation. A number of projects in the lab center on ways to improve the efficiency of islet function or ways to improve islet transplant success by inducing replication of islet cells or differentiation of beta cells form stem cells.