Advancements in Organ Transplantation

Product Director, OCS Heart Platform
TransMedics Inc

"The TransMedics OCS Heart Platform: Past, Present, and Future"
The OCS Heart Platform has been instrumental in making DCD heart donation a reality.  As the field of cardiac transplantation evolves, the OCS Heart System continues to play a vital role in the retrieval and preservation of donor hearts.  Looking forward, no doubt we will continue to see the evolution of warm mechanical perfusion and expansion of its use to a broad range of applications.

Bio: Dr. Julius Carillo, MD completed his surgical training in general and cardiothoracic surgery at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He was a clinical assistant professor of surgery at NYU prior to joining TransMedics. He currently serves as Product Director for the OCS Heart Platform.

Assistant Professor
Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering
Texas A&M University

CEO
BioChoric Inc.

"Cold, Chaos, Confinement: How Innovations in Materials Thermodynamics are Unlocking the Promise of Organ Preservation"
Modern cryopreservation exists at the convergence of many disciplines—materials science, physical chemistry, mechanical engineering, biomedicine, etc.—which are unified by the surprising throughline of thermodynamics. Here, we will demonstrate how fundamental thermodynamic innovations are driving transformative new technologies for organ cryopreservation and transplantation, across temperature regimes and clinical use cases. We will describe recent world-first allo-transplantations of porcine kidneys stored at sub-0 °C for multiple days, enabled by an ice-free, CPA-free supercooling device; key technological advances in whole organ banking, enabled by new predictive paradigms for viscosity, stability, and crack resistance; and an overarching vision for clinical translation. Prolonged organ preservation promises to realize the grand potential of modern transplantation—and thermodynamics stands poised to unlock it.

Bio: Matt Powell-Palm is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science & Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University, the CEO of BioChoric Inc., and the President of Maximize Bio. He works on both fundamental and translational aspects of multi-spectrum cryopreservation, and is passionate about expanding access to life-saving organ transplantation.

Co-founder
Revalia Bio

"Emerging Technologies and Strategic Innovations in Organ Transplantation"
Organ transplantation is entering a period of rapid technological transformation. This presentation will explore emerging innovations across organ assessment, preservation and manipulation, including advanced machine perfusion platforms, cellular and regenerative therapies, and genetic engineering approaches. Beyond technical advances, it will address the systemic challenges that determine real-world impact: regulatory pathways, health-economic constraints, scalability, and clinical adoption. By examining how these technologies can be integrated into coherent, end-to-end solutions, the talk will highlight opportunities to expand the donor pool, improve graft outcomes, and fundamentally reshape the future of transplantation.

Bio: I am an MD PhD, Liver Transplant Surgeon, Professor of Transplantation at University of Cambridge and Investigator at Harvard Medical School/MGH. I am co-founder of Revalia Bio, KriTransplant two companies focused on the extended preservation of human organs and their use in transplantation and drug development.

Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer
Until Labs

"Delivering Organ Preservation to the Clinic: Progress and Present Challenges"
Reversible vitrification of donor organs has the potential to transform transplantation by eliminating ischemic time constraints and enabling true organ banking—so patients can receive the organ that offers the best chance at long-term health. Achieving this clinically requires coordinated advances in material science, device engineering, molecular biology, and functional organ assessment. At Until, we have built an intellectually diverse team to tackle these challenges simultaneously. In this talk, I will present recent our technical progress in organ cryopreservation and outline our roadmap to translate reversible vitrification into a clinical reality.

Bio: Hunter is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Until Labs. He studied physics at the University of Chicago, earned a PhD in chemistry at Caltech, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Harvard. His academic work spans neuroimaging, nanoscale magnetics, and molecular biology, unified by a pursuit of understanding life at its most fundamental scales.

At Until, Hunter leads development of the company’s preservation technologies, focusing on enabling safe, practical organ and tissue cryopreservation to extend viable transplant times from hours to weeks or longer. For him, this is not speculative futurism but an infrastructural medical problem: how to maintain biological integrity so that people can have more time with their loved ones. As a leader and mentor, he believes fiercely in the power of agency and in the ability of a motivated team to build technologies that transform the world.

Founder 
Transplant Futures

Bio: Dr. Giwa is a Founder of Transplant Futures. Companies that he founded have raised triple digit millions of dollars from VC, gotten FDA go-aheads and been featured as an NIH Success Story.

His background includes research at world leading hedge fund Bridgewater, Bain and Goldman Sachs, and being a board member at NDN, one of the highest performing Organ Procurement Organizations in the world.  He has spoken widely on regenerative medicine, including on Capitol Hill and at the White House.

Dr. Giwa holds a PhD in Economics (conducted at SSE and Harvard) and an MBA from Harvard where he was named a Baker Scholar, and he is a Fellow at the Institute for Engineering in Medicine at UMN.

Eunice L. Dwan Endowed Chair for Diabetes Research
Distinguished McKnight University Professor
Professor of Surgery
University of Minnesota

Bio: Erik Finger, MD, PhD, is the Eunice L. Dwan Endowed Chair for Diabetes Research, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, and Professor of Surgery at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on organ and tissue preservation, with an emphasis on advancing transplantation outcomes. A multi-organ abdominal transplant surgeon specializing in kidney and pancreas transplantation, Dr. Finger is actively involved in clinical transplantation, tolerance trials, and basic research in transplant immunology and organ preservation. He is supported by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Among his recent achievements is the first reproducible long-term cryopreservation of organs, followed by successful transplantation.