Leonardo Vidal Riella, MD, PhD
Medical Director of Kidney Transplant Program Associate Director, Legorreta Center for Clinical Transplant Tolerance, Massachusetts General Hospital
This lectureship was established to honor Dr. Shaul G. Massry for his scientific achievements and his contributions to the kidney healthcare community and to the National Kidney Foundation.
Leonardo V. Riella, MD, PhD is the Harold and Ellen Danser Endowed Chair in Transplant Surgery and Associate Professor of Surgery and Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He serves as Medical Director of Kidney Transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he leads clinical and translational initiatives aimed at improving transplant outcomes. His work focuses on immune regulation and the development of novel strategies to promote transplant tolerance. Dr. Riella founded and leads the TANGO Consortium, the largest international collaboration dedicated to studying recurrence of glomerular diseases after kidney transplantation. In March 2024, he led the world's first successful transplantation of a gene edited pig kidney into a living human, a landmark advance in xenotransplantation that has opened the door to clinical trials addressing the global shortage of donor organs. He now leads the first FDA approved pilot study in kidney xenotransplantation and conducts high dimensional immune profiling studies to characterize the human xeno immune response and guide next generation immunosuppressive strategies.
