I live in Boston, where I'm a transplant surgeon-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. I take care of liver and kidney transplant patients and work on one problem: there are not enough organs.
In 2024, I was part of the surgical team that performed the world's first kidney xenotransplant into a living patient, using a genetically edited pig kidney. Our team later achieved 271 days of dialysis-free survival in a patient who went on to receive a human kidney. These cases were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.
Part of the work is making better use of the organs we already have. Machine perfusion keeps donor organs alive and functioning outside the body, so we can assess, treat or rejuvenate them before transplant. I train machine learning models on national registry data to predict whether a donor kidney will work, how it will behave during ex vivo perfusion, and where it should be allocated. I also invented a cooling jacket that keeps a kidney cold while it's sewn in, instead of letting it rewarm inside the patient.
I'm a builder at heart, and organs aren't the only thing in short supply. Expert surgeons take decades to train and can only be in one room at a time. With Operavue, I'm building the data that surgical robots and physical AI will learn from, so that expert surgery can reach anyone, anywhere.
I came to transplantation through aging. My doctoral work at Harvard explored why some organs withstand stress better than others and how a molecule (hydrogen sulfide) shapes healthspan. After my PhD, I returned to Switzerland, where I paired surgical practice with molecular biology research to tackle a key bottleneck in transplantation: making organs more resilient to injury. That work now shapes my approach to xenotransplantation, with the goal of engineering healthier organs to address both organ scarcity and aging.
Looking ahead, I think xenotransplantation can turn organs from a scarce gift into a product. It could mean an unlimited supply of young organs, and eventually a way to treat aging itself, which is in large part a story of organs failing one at a time. I want to build that with genome engineering, organ perfusion and AI in one stack.